Ten years on, Iona Technologies is ready to be big. Very big. Forget about being a software company, or even a software and services company, Iona's two previous incarnations. Now, the firm wants to be a platform, the first Irish company with the reach and control of an Intel, a Microsoft, a Cisco, an Oracle.

A platform, says Iona's chief executive Mr Barry Morris, is "an infrastructure on which you run things". That could be an operating system or a microchip design, but in Iona's case, it's a software suite that knits together different computing systems and creates a base on which other applications - particularly those that interweave with the Internet - can run and be managed. "What we're saying in essence is, think about (Iona) as an Internet operating platform."

"We strongly believe it's going to be our breakthrough year, in terms of growth and energy," says co-founder and chairman Dr Chris Horn, the former Trinity academic, who last May stepped down as chief executive to focus on networking and handling Iona's senior customers.

As the pioneering Irish technology company reaches its tenth birthday this week, Iona can be forgiven for having grand visions and feeling fairly pleased with itself - especially when contrasted with many of the companies limping along in the current market climate.

The second Irish technology company to have its initial public offering on the American Nasdaq exchange, Iona has taken a few market hits but never any real body blows. After the dotcom bluster of 18months-to-IPO-without-profits marketing plans, Iona seems almost ridiculously old-fashioned in having been in the black every single year of operation.

Gradual growth brought the company from 11 initial employees to 850. Its clients include many of the best-known corporate names in the world, along with more than a few national and state governments. Its share price has rollercoastered, with a dip in late 1999 and a more recent drop in the current market, but unlike most tech companies on the Nasdaq, Iona stayed fairly close to its market peak for all of 2000 and most of this year.

Now, "total business integration" has replaced the old company slogan, "making software work together", and a string of acquisitions - most recently, the respected Californian business-to-business integration company Netfish - have given greater breadth to the company (the markets clearly liked the acquisition, and obligingly nudged Iona's share price back up in the aftermath of the announcement).

The company is still pumping 18 to 20 per cent of total revenue back into research and development, and nearly a fourth of its employees are engineers. Accordingly, the company is trumpeting a new "one platform, one vendor" motto as well, as it takes aim at its "platform" aspirations ("Because that's where the money is," Mr Morris half-jokes).

It's all a very different scenario from when the company was founded in 1991 by the Trinity triumvirate of Dr Horn, Mr Annrai O'Toole and Dr Sean Baker. Even the concept of a university company was alien, and the idea of taking it outside academia and into the marketplace in the then-spluttering economy was met with some incredulity.

"I'd been fortunate enough to visit Silicon Valley and see how things were done out there. I thought, we're as good as that in Ireland; we have people who can do this level of work," says Dr Horn. "I was out to prove that."

In 1991, Iona faced "some opposition from other faculties" at Trinity, and "scepticism" from the State agencies. "We literally put about £1,000 each in, and bootstrapped it from there," he says, noting that Iona built itself up primarily from its own profits and, eventually, a $600,000 investment from Sun Microsystems in 1993, which gave Sun a lucrative 25 per cent stake it has since cashed in. "I think we broke a lot of preconceived moulds and challenged some sacred cows along the way," says Dr Horn.

Initially, all 11 employees served as the company sales team. Unusually, the company decided to go not for big contracts but for ubiquity - selling its software relatively cheaply, as a ready-to-go, shrink-wrapped product - "the Sony model rather than Bang & Olufssen," says Mr Morris. Also unusually, the first product was sold by telephone rather than a field team. Why by phone? "Part of it was just the sheer logistics of doing it from Ireland," says Dr Horn. "We also had engineers selling to engineers. We won credibility with the engineers first."

Mr Morris, who joined Iona as a channel and business development manager in 1994, says: "In those early days there wasn't a model for starting a software company. Iona was really the first substantial software IPO." Dr Horn says the greatest challenge for the company was building a solid, global management team in the year leading up to the 1997 IPO - although he adds that, "emotionally", Iona's biggest hurdle was "just producing the very first product".

Now, "it's clearly a very different Ireland", he says, noting the strength of the economy, the availability of venture capital, and the better-developed base of skills and expertise.

And these days, Mr Morris refers to Iona as "a small $500 million company". Both say they'd like to see indigenous technology companies pushing past the £1 billion mark, because a number of Irish companies in that range are "needed to provide the air cover for others to grow up in", says Mr Morris.

They see this as not just a necessary situation but as the biggest problem the Republic has to tackle: creating a Silicon Valley-like, complex networking environment in which the existing successful companies provide a platform for launching successive new generations of industry innovation. In California, such an environment developed out of the initial close relationship between Stanford University and its graduates, the eventual company founders who created the companies that produced further spin-offs.

"We need to do more work together to create a synergistic value level," says Mr Morris. That means alliances, partnerships and other relationships with smaller Irish companies. Until now, "the Irish market has been too immature", says Mr Morris. "There's a dozen or so really good start-ups right now, but they won't get anywhere" in the increasingly complex business environment -- and negative market - without greater support from an Irish network that can act as a Silicon Valley-like catalyst, he believes.

Dr Horn says a formal structure won't work for such a network - it can't be a Government or even industry "project" - but it does require focus and effort from indigenous companies. He says Iona intends to make some commitments to younger companies itself - but is not ready for announcements quite yet.

But is the Republic too cynical and begrudging for such a network to come into being? "You're never going to get away from Irish cynicism," laughs Mr Morris. "It goes with creativity. But entrepreneurs are optimists. No one succeeds without being an optimist. And the Ireland of today is by far more positive, forward-looking and constructive than it was 20 years ago."