Intune Networks, the company that has developed a breakthrough communications technology that will meet future network traffic demands and which plans to IPO in the next three years, has won the ‘Innovation of the Year’ award.
The company came out top at the Irish Times InterTrade Ireland Innovation Awards, held last night at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham.
Headquartered in Dublin, Intune Networks has plans to revolutionise the telecoms industry by changing the opportunities for service providers. The company set out to evolve network architectures to cope with the unpredictable traffic demand for internet service providers, while controlling costs.
The explosion in video content and emerging models for cloud-based services has put a strain on networks that has resulted in greater demand.
Intune Networks has developed its breakthrough technology, named Optical Packet Switch and Transport (OPST), that will alleviate bottlenecks across systems.
The company was established in 1999 by Tom Farrell and John Dunne, both graduates of UCD. Intune Networks employs 120 people, has design centres in Dublin and Belfast, and offices in the US and UK. The company has ambitious expansion plans and has received more than €49m in funding from investors to date.
“These awards are designed to recognise the best innovations in businesses across the island of Ireland,” Liam Nellis, chief executive of InterTradeIreland and chair of the innovation awards final judging panel explained.
“Intune Networks is an excellent example of company that is at the pinnacle of innovation. For 30 years, laboratories have attempted to achieve what has been achieved by Intune Networks over the last four years by developing a clever piece of intellectual property that is commercial and scaleable, to speed up the transmission of data on the internet.
“Intune Networks is an indigenous company that has developed a product with the potential to revolutionise the telecoms industry on a global scale.”
Receiving the award, Intune CTO John Dunne said: “It is a fantastic honour for all at Intune and a great recognition for our team of engineers in particular who have worked for over four years on a networking innovation that we believe will open up the network for application developers.”
Finalists at innovation awards
More than 120 companies entered the six categories of the competition. Twenty-one of these were then shortlisted for the awards by a judging panel, before the final winners were selected.
The six category winners are:
· North/South Collaboration: Vennetics, Dundalk
· Product Innovation: Intune Networks, Dublin and Belfast (and overall winner)
· Public Service Innovation: AMNCH (Tallaght Hospital), Dublin
· Service Innovation: Ammado, Dublin
· Organisational System/Process: FitzGerald Nurseries, Kilkenny
· Application of R&D: Celtic Catalysts, Dublin
· Greentech: Kingspan Renewables Ltd, Armagh
The final judging panel for the event included Colm Long of Facebook; Liam Nellis InterTradeIreland; Peter Callan of The Irish Times Group; Michael Carey of Jacob Fruitfield Food Group; Tim Cody of Accenture; Ivan Coulter of Sigmoid Pharma and Deirdre Terrins of Crescent Capital.
