BUSINESS
Corvil releases first product
12-07-2004
by Craig Liddell
Following ten years of research, Dublin-based Corvil has announced the general release of its core product.
On Monday, the Cisco-backed developer of Internet Protocol (IP) management software released CorvilNet1.1, a tool helps IT managers to control bandwidth. The company currently has several financial institutions and service providers on its books, but will not reveal names.
"Over the past 12 months... we've been preparing CorvilNet for general release by working with both large enterprises and service providers in early field trials of the product," said Corvil chief executive officer (CEO), Donal Byrne. "The same fundamental issues keep cropping up about how to 'sweat the assets' while at the same time rolling out new services like Voice over IP without falling over the edge in terms of quality."
Feedback from the trials has been encouraging, the company says, and the product has proven to generate cost savings and improve risk mitigation.
Ten years in development, the CorvilNet platform allows network operators to improve the amount of traffic and the number of customers that can be supported on current data infrastructure, while also controlling the Quality of Service (QoS).
Corvil grew out of a research project developed by mathematician, Professor John Lewis, when he was leading a team at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS). In the early 1990s, when the Irish government announced that such projects would no longer be funded unless they had commercial potential, Lewis began investigating possible applications for his mathematical knowledge and settled on the communications field.
Lewis joined forces with some employees in the research division of Swedish company, Telia, to package some of the intellectual property that emerged from this project with the aim of raising capital to establish a company. These discussions led to the founding of a company called Measure Technology Ireland, which became Corvil in April 2000 after it secured seed funding from ACT Venture Capital.
The Dublin-based company most recently closed a EUR10 million funding round in March 2003 and investors included Cisco Systems, Apax Partners and ACT Venture Capital. This brings the total amount of funding to EUR15 million.
A spokesperson for the company told ElectricNews.Net that Corvil is aiming for profitability in 2005, in preparation for a possible listing in 2007. He said that revenue growth will be more accurately reflected by the end of this year and staff numbers have increased to 53, by contrast to 30 at the end of 2003.
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