CEO - Gerard Byrne


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Gerard Byrne is the CEO and founder of Experience IT. He holds a BA Mod (Comp. Sci) from TCD. Despite having a technical background, Gerard’s early work experience was in sales and marketing. Throughout his career, Gerard has worked with accounting, distribution, manufacturing, payroll and financial systems. These days he would describe himself as an Architectus Oryzus.

In 1995, Gerard went on to start his own consultancy - providing training and implementation of accounting systems and aimed at SMEs. In 1997 he undertook an initial 6 months project with Digifone (to become O2). This relationship with O2 was to last a further 7 years and during which Experience IT grew to employ 12 people of whom 4 worked exclusively on O2 projects. Gerard loves databases - Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL - even MS Access! Since he got the bug in 1990, writing a system for a printers in VP Info, all his career has centered around building systems which move and report on data.

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Before starting his own business, Gerard worked for GFK Technology (1987-92). GFK wrote the Take Five accounting suite and Gerard was responsible for the launch of the Professional/1 and Professional/2 suites and the EasyPay and ProPay payroll software. He managed a dealer network of 24 resellers. GFK’s products were used by thousands of Irish businesses and the undisputed market leaders.

In 1993, Gerard was Sales Manager for Odyssey Systems - a mid-range Open Systems, Progress 3GL solutions provider which had the Irish agency for Proteus ERP and Financials. He subsequently accepted the role of Country Manager (Ireland) for Tetra Business Systems and managed the support and sales of Tetra’s high-end manufacturing, logistics and financials series. Tetra was subsequently purchased by Sage Group as was GFK Technology.