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21st Oct 2011

‘Business is mostly a lot of bad news’: Openet chiefs land Ernst and Young Entrepreneur award

Joe Hogan and Niall Norton have been awarded the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for 2011 at a ceremony in Dublin on Thursday night.

JOE

Joe Hogan and Niall Norton have been awarded the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for 2011 at a ceremony in Dublin on Thursday night.

The pair are at the helm of Openet, a high-end software engineering firm which services telecommunications giants all over the world, including AT & T, Orange, Vodafone, Telstra and Verizon. Oh, and eircom.

The company, which was founded in 1999, now employs more than 800 people in several countries, with offices in Ireland, the United States, Malaysia and Brazil, making it Ireland’s largest privately owned software firm.

Revealing the secret of the success, Joe Hogan said, “There’s no substitute for hard work. Business is mostly a lot of bad news, interspersed with spikes of good news. You need to keep at it.”

Openet, which now plans to recruit up to 50 software engineers, saw its turnover break the $100m mark last year, and Niall Norton is still aiming for more inroads – telling Newstalk’s Breakfast Business show that the next target is to rip past the $500m threshold.

Frank O’Keeffe of the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards said, “99 per cent of Openet revenues come from outside Ireland and its software is used by some of the largest brands across the globe.

“As Ireland looks forward to a new era of economic growth, Joe and Niall are the type of role models that we need to look towards, to demonstrate what can be achieved with unwavering ambition, creativity and hard work.”

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