CWSI aims to become leading mobile and cloud security provider for Microsoft in Europe
The Dublin-based company has made three recent acquisitions as it seeks to scale further internationally
CWSI is a Dublin-based business with offices in Belgium, Britain and the Netherlands that provides security services for mobile devices. The business has grown to 125 staff since it was founded in 2011
“When we say mobile devices, we mean anything you could lift up and walk out the door with. That includes tablets and laptops as well as smartphones,” Ronan Murphy, chief executive of CWSI, told the Business Post.
“The idea for the company came from myself and Philip Harrison, my co-founder. In 2010, when the iPad was launched, we saw that a lot of people were challenged by using these consumer-based devices in a work setting. Their IT support didn’t know how to manage them.”
Murphy said that he and Harrison realised there was a business opportunity when he heard about the chief executive of an Irish retailer walking into his IT team with an iPad, and telling them to figure out a way to support it within two hours.
“That was the genesis of the idea,” he said. “We started off as a single-product company to provide a way to secure devices. In 2014 we began to expand our product base, and in 2017 we started bringing in the Microsoft stack as it started to move into that space.”
CWSI has become one of the primary partners for Microsoft worldwide, part of an elite global group of 400 called the Microsoft Intelligence Security Association (MISA). For context, Microsoft has 22,000 partners in Britain alone which means CWSI is in special company as part of MISA.
“It’s pretty cool to be part of that and we were globally recognised by Microsoft with an award in September,” Murphy said.
CWSI started out with a goal to scale, and that involved finding channels where it could expand. Its first customer was Glanbia before it grew into the financial sector.
“We saw that the market in Ireland, in the mobile operator space, was underserved. It was logical to go to mobile providers, so we white-labelled our services so the likes of O2 and Eir could offer them,” Murphy said.
“Then we went to the UK. We had credibility with the Irish arm of O2 before it was sold to Three, and we started with O2 there in 2017. We’ve developed some great customers over there including the NHS and Network Rail.”
CWSI has been supported by Enterprise Ireland, having been part of the high potential start-up unit.
“Enterprise Ireland is an investor in the business and has been extremely supportive to us, particularly in the UK,” Murphy said. “They are still helping us. I’ve just started working with the local team in Brussels and they’ve been very helpful at making introductions.”
The business has made three acquisitions in the last months as it seeks to scale further internationally. The first was AVR in Britain in May 2021, followed by Blaud in the Netherlands in April of this year and then Mobco, which operates in Belgium and Luxembourg, in July.
“Our ambition is to become the leading mobile and cloud security provider for Microsoft in Europe. We’re well on the way to that,” Murphy said. “We have a beachhead in the Benelux region and we want to push further into Europe.
This Making It Work article was produced in partnership with Enterprise Ireland
