After more than 8 years of successful trading I regret to inform all interested parties that OpenConnect (Ireland) Ltd. (OCI) has closed from 31/07/2006.

I started OCI in 1998 for £5,000 and, over the next 8 years, I brought over £1.4 Million into the Northern Ireland economy (most of it from outside the EC) and provided employment for a total of 8 people.

We developed Internet, Intranet, Extranet, eBusiness and eCommerce systems for a wide variety of clients including

• UBS and Zurich Kantonal Bank

• Roche Pharmaceuticals and BMW

• the Ascom conglomerate and Sika Chemicals Corporation

• as well as other more specialist Swiss and German customers like

• AdHoc,

• Aventic,

• The Fantastic Corporation,

• TODD AG

We also produced the Web-based version of Viviance' ThinkTanx eLearning system.

Following the core strategy that I designed at the beginning of 1998, OCI achieved

• 1998 – Full Remote Development
  (We worked from N.I. live on servers in Switzerland and Germany. We described this as 'Commuting from Belfast to Zurich every morning')

• 2000 – The Paperless Office
  (Between 2000 and 2004 only 4 OpenConnect paper documents were transferred between Switzerland and N.I.
  All 4 were legal documents requiring my physical signature.
  Tens of thousands of electronic documents and hundreds of thousands of conversations were exchanged during this time.
  It is thanks to pioneering companies like OCI that such things are now considered ordinary and commonplace amongst SMEs everywhere.)

• 2002 - Virtual Teams
  (We were already used to working with people in Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Denmark.
  When OCI's Philip McIlvenna emigrated to Vancouver, he stopped work on Thursday afternoon, emigrated over the weekend, spent the next week getting set up in his new apartment in Vancouver and started work again the following Monday.
  It was as if he had gone on holiday for a week and nothing had changed except that our European network now included Canada as well)

• 2004/2005 – Virtual Office
  By now, each of us was effectively an autonomous unit, requiring only a laptop and a broadband connection to work productively.
  The lease on our building ran out at the end of July 2005 and I did not renew it. Instead, we worked from home (or wherever we were).

The final step would have been to move to the virtual company with no employees and everything outsourced to sub-contractors. I had calculated that if I could manage this successfully, my employees could be 30-40% better off financially.

In fact, a downturn in the market for bespoke systems combined with fierce competition from Eastern Europe caused our Swiss Parent Company (who owned 75% of OCI) to 'rethink their strategy'. Their failure to raise some Mezzanine finance turned expansion plans to triple the size of OCI into, overnight, a plan to close it altogether within 6 months.

We could have tried to go it alone but I and the remaining employees decided that 8 years was enough and it was time for all of us to move on – they into safe jobs with much bigger companies and I into a new life in consultancy.

The great experiment was over but at least I achieved very nearly everything that I set out to back in 1998 when, in Northern Ireland anyway, the strategy I describe above was considered by the experts to be science fiction and anyone attempting it to be little better than a lunatic.

Oh yes, I achieved all of the above without a bank overdraft or credit facility of any kind and I have never received even a penny of Government funding.

Chris Marshall – Ex Managing Director of OpenConnect (Ireland) Limited.