Mr Colm Piercy

Hailing from Tramore, Co. Waterford, Colm graduated in 1993 from the University of Limerick (UL) with a Degree in Production Engineering (1st Hons). 

Staying within UL as a contract Lecturer in Computing and Mechatronics to both Undergraduate and Postgraduate courses, in 1995 Colm co-founded the Automation Research Centre, ARC, with Hassan Kaghazchi of the Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering Department. This continues today, delivering applied control engineering research, development and commercialisation along with associated industry training initiatives. 

With the entrepreneurial bug biting, Colm left UL for Dundalk in 1998 to head up at Dundalk Institute of Technology (DKIT) its business incubation centre (Regional Development Centre), national graduate training programmes (Coca Cola National Enterprise Awards, Technology Innovation Programme, Food Enterprise Programme, and others), and supporting R&D programmes and innovation services between DKIT and Industry. 

During his time with DKIT, Colm also acted as joint Head of Development for the Institute for one year and was National Placement Manager for the Government's IT Skills Initiative addressing the then skills shortage in Ireland, coordinating six month job placements for the graduating participants with Ireland's leading employers nationwide such as Intel, HP, Microsoft and others. 

Mid-2001 Colm left the public sector to build Digiweb and by the end of that year was employing 6 fulltime staff and was a disruptive new entrant in the web hosting sector, challenging the dominance of established players in the market. Over the years Digiweb has expanded into new sectors including Wireless and Satellite Broadband, Fibre Networks, Telephony and VOIP, data centres, fibre networks, and cloud computing. 

A number of acquisitions were made along the way including Novara Technologies in 2008, Smart Telecom in 2009 followed in 2010 with Internet Ireland acquired from Independent News & Media plc and both TalkTalk Ireland and TalkTalk Belgium acquired from the Carphone Warehouse Group. Digiweb is now one of Irelands leading telecoms and IT services providers and is wholly owned and operated in Ireland. 

Colm continues to be the majority shareholder and the Digiweb team has expanded to 162 staff, supporting 100,000 customers in consumer, business and government sectors across Ireland, UK, and Belgium and has recently established its London office and team to drive further organic growth and M&A activity. The business has an active pipeline of further acquisitions under development and is periodically recognised by the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards where it has featured in the top 3 many times. 

More recently, Colm has become an active seed investor in a number of early stage Irish businesses and continues to seek further opportunities in Ireland and beyond. Spending his time between offices in Dublin, London and Dundalk, Colm also enjoys travel, architecture, and photography. 

The above text is an extract from the 2011 UL Alumni Awards Souvenir Booklet.