At a reception in the RDS on January 29th Novara IT received the Colleran Award for Enterprise 2003. Presented by the Dublin City Enterprise Board, the awards were established in 1998 in memory of Denis Colleran.
Speaking at the event Mr. Gerry Macken (chief executive, Dublin City Enterprise Board) said that Novara had been selected for a number of reasons. The board felt that Novara had weathered the .com shake out well and were in an excellent position to benefit from future growth in the Internet services sector.
Mr. Macken also stated that the investment in Novara made by the chief executive, Eoin Costello, both in terms of personal effort and financial
resources, was an important factor. He stated that this kind of entrepreneurial spirit (Mr. Costello sold his jewellery business
www.costellojewellers.ie in 2000 to set up Novara IT) is what the enterprise boards want to foster and encourage.
One final consideration was the location of Novara's offices in a disused warehouse in Dublin's city centre, helping bring high tech jobs to a designated redevelopment area adjoining O'Connell Street.
Eoin Costello, chief executive of Novara, welcomed the award as recognition of the work the team at Novara had been doing for the past number of years. He stated that Novara will continue investing in the development of its proprietary systems (most importantly the Novara Customer Management system) which give the company its competitive advantage. He said that the signs were that 2004 would turn out to be a good one for the IT sector and that Novara is well placed to benefit from this upturn.
More About the Colleran Award
Mr. Colleran acted as chair of Dublin City Enterprise Board's Evaluation Committee for many years. He work with the Enterprise Board went well
beyond the call of duty. He was a career banker with Bank of Ireland and ended up divisional manager for Dublin at the bank. The award itself was sponsored by the bank as a tribute to his memory.
Previous winners of the Award include Medicom, Webbusters, and Red Post Productions.
More About Novara IT
Novara was incorporated in November 2000. It currently provides the following services:
* Domain Registration: Trade as Register.ie, 20% market share.
* Web Hosting: Trade as Host.ie, 7% market share.
* Web Promotion: Trade as Promote.ie.
* Secure certificates: Trade as Securecerts.ie
Current staff: 10
Funding of Euro180,000 was provided to date by the chief executive, Eoin Costello.
Novara addresses markets that were typically dominated by US and UK companies and Novara's success in the Irish market to date has been due to
the development of strong brands such as Register.ie and Host.ie The company has always focused on product development and quality service. As a result Novara is now ranked 5th largest Internet Service Provider in Ireland according to Whois Ireland statistics This fact was recognised when Novara was winner of Irish Domain Registry Internet Champion Award 2002.
