Paper tiger in the office jungle
Jane Suiter meets Declan Foley, whose company is focused on eliminating paper in the workplace
Sunday July 27 2008
DECLAN Foley, managing director of Advanced Field Solutions, is a man with a mission to ban paper from our offices. Unsurprisingly for a tech director, Foley, from Swords in north county Dublin, was a techy teenager buying his first Commodore 64 before he left school and was set on becoming an electronic engineer, starting off at Kevin Street College.
However, a holiday job in the US set him off on an entrepreneurial route. Foley's brother was a champion swimmer on the Irish team.
Foley also swam but "was on the B team". Nevertheless, he travelled the world on his brother's coat tails, as he says, and qualified as a swim teacher.
This landed him a job at the upmarket Camp Takajo Maine. There he met Louis Ravenet who was running the photography camp and the two immediately hit it off. Foley deferred his return to Kevin Street and headed off to Baltimore where Ravenet set up the Alpha Group, which was essentially a computer repairer. Within a few years the company had moved into cabling and network integration and had won an €8m contract with the US Department of Defence. In the meantime Foley moved back to Ireland, working for Tomorrow's World for seven years before Ravenet persuaded him back to the Alpha Group, setting up a division in Ireland. A few years later its software division icommunicate.net, a customer support service, was sold to Microsoft. As part of the deal, Lewis had to work with Microsoft so the Alpha Group was sold and in 2002 Foley set up Advanced Field Solutions in Ireland. The idea was to replicate icommunicate's success, selling out to Microsoft again within a few years.
To begin with, all went to plan and AFS was made a global strategic partner of Microsoft, which meant full access to all Microsoft buildings and offices. Foley was on the outside filling the gap, while Ravenet was still on the inside. The company went looking for funding from DCC and then lined up more from Niall McFadden. However, in a devastating move, after a year Microsoft pulled back and decided they would build the mobile component themselves. "They had all our intellectual property at that stage. Our only option was to compete with Microsoft over a Microsoft clip on, or dump our product. So we had to dump it."
Undeterred, Foley set about building AFS as a web-based service management company, with Ravenet providing mentoring and guidance. In November 2004 AFS won the ICT Excellence Award for mobile innovation and in 2005 the O2 Data Partner of the Year Award. The company fits into the new zeitgeist with its green focus on eliminating the need for paper and doing away with service books, receipts, maintenance sheets, and so on.
Over the past five years the business has been growing rapidly and now dispatches about 180,000 jobs a month for companies from O2 and BT to Hibernian, BOC Gases and Beamish & Crawford.
