Since he first left his hometown of Lurgan, Co Armagh, Barry Haughian has hardly sat still. Telcos and the development of the internet of things have provided him with work on several continents, but he always gravitates back to Madrid, “the most relaxed city in the world”, where he now lives with his family, working remotely for the Ukrainian firm Intellias as global vice-president of IOT.
In his early career, Haughian worked in Athlone for Ericsson. “There were big opportunities at the time. Ireland was not booming, but it was starting to boom. And the IT industry was starting to move to dot-com.”
The industry brought him to Italy, where he worked in Rome for a couple of years as a consultant.
“The Irish community, they’re so good. You walk into the Irish pub and the guys take you under their wing because I didn’t know anybody else speaking English. And then you’re looked after, and then you become part of the community,” he says.
“I came over to Madrid to visit a friend who was working there in Ericsson. Rome is a fantastic city to live in, but it’s very complicated unless you’re used to it – nothing works; it’s a mess of a place.” Madrid proved to be something else entirely.
“The city’s clean. It’s got an infrastructure. Everything works ... So I phoned and got a job there and stayed for two years.”
In Madrid he worked as a consultant, troubleshooting with telcos, including Ericsson, which then brought him to Central America, specifically Mexico. ‘I’d been there before and I loved the place. It was not like it is now; it was a safe back then.
Aberdeen is the coldest place I’ve ever lived in my life. I wasn’t a fan of Aberdeen city. I thought it was very rough
“I was in Saltillo, which is in the north near Monterrey, near the border. I was picking where I wanted to live because we were lucky at the time we could do that.”
He has also worked in Panama, the Dominican Republic and the Cayman Islands. “I probably fixed a fault for every single operator in the world, I’d say, at some stage,” he says. It hasn’t always been straightforward, given the way things work in certain parts of the world. “You always have to be careful who’s asking you and get it verified, because the authorities can choose from one day to the next,” he says.
His work with Ericsson saw him involved in large projects in sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia. At one stage, an internet-of-things project with the company looked like it might involve a move to the company’s home country, Sweden, which he was not keen on.
“It’s easier to move south than north,” he says. That may have been influenced by his time in Aberdeen studying for his master’s. “Aberdeen is the coldest place I’ve ever lived in my life,” he says. “I wasn’t a fan of Aberdeen city, I thought it was very rough.”
Cold is not something he has to worry about any more. He’s happily settled in Madrid and has an affection for Ukraine. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Haughian housed refugees in Ireland, where he owns a castle in Co Galway. It was sitting empty at the time, after a failed attempt to move back with his family. The lack of light in a castle and the driving Galway rain proved no match for the Spanish sunshine.
“I’m pretty impulsive. If I say I’m going to do something I just do it, to hell with the consequences,” he says. It all worked out and he now has Ukrainian “friends for life”. Despite his newfound friends, Haughian hadn’t been there until this year, when his employer brought him to Lviv to speak at the IT Arena tech conference.
“I was panicking about coming, I really was,” he says, but it all worked out well. Despite being a remote worker, he says the company is continuously in touch to make sure he’s safe and well, something that has become standard practice for Ukrainian companies in recent years.
He was speaking at the conference about the internet of things, where the buzz about AI and defence tech is palpable. “If you are building any AI system, you need data. How do you get the data? You get it from IOT. It’s that simple.
“Someone said to me recently that IOT is taking a back seat to AI now, but it’s not a competition between technology; nobody cares. Almost every IOT system will have AI now, whether they need it or not, because it’s a boom for the next few years. And it’ll die down again, like it did before,” he says.
Away from work, horse riding helps clears his head, having come to equestrian sports later in life after a “city slickers” trip at a ranch in the United States.
