About
Meet the team
Our team have a lot of experience in IT and managed services, accumulated over many years working together in a prior venture. Together we grew that business to 125 employees offering services to clients locally, nationally, and internationally. We won many awards and enjoyed the journey together.
But most of all, we enjoy what we do, and we enjoy the feeling that comes from a happy client and a job well done.
Stephen Collopy
Technology Director
Stephen sets the technical direction for how Azurite builds and runs client environments, having served as Director of IT Services in a larger managed-services group beforehand. He came up through systems engineering and solution architecture and holds a master’s in digital forensics alongside a broad set of vendor certifications spanning virtualisation, storage, backup, and security. More than two decades in, his instinct is for environments that are built properly the first time and stay manageable long after.
Greg Costello
Commercial Manager
Greg has spent more than twenty-five years in the Irish IT sector, most of it in business development - getting to the bottom of what a business actually needs before matching it to a solution. He started out on the delivery side, in projects and process management, which is a large part of why he sells the way he does: grounded in what can realistically be delivered rather than what sounds good in the room. The people he works with tend to stay in touch long after the deal is done.
Jonathan Deane
Solutions Director
Jonathan has spent more than twenty-five years deep in the infrastructure stack, taking client environments from a handful of staff up to several thousand without losing his footing. He’s a natural troubleshooter, the person you want on the problem others have set aside and he leads technically by bringing the engineers around him up with him. He’s certified across the major infrastructure vendors, with a plain, unshowy commitment to doing right by the customer.
Karl Dowling
Managing Director
Karl is Azurite’s managing director and one of its co-founders. He has spent more than twenty-five years in the Irish IT sector building and leading sales, earning a board seat and a shareholding along the way, and steering a business through to a trade sale in January 2022. He built Azurite around a conviction that where trust and compliance can’t be treated as optional, an IT failure is a regulatory and reputational problem as much as an operational one and that’s the standard he wants the firm held to.
David Jeffreys
Director
Dave is one of Azurite’s co-founders, with twenty-five years in technology and leadership. He built and led a technology services business to more than a hundred people and eight-figure revenues, through three acquisitions and a trade sale. A computer systems graduate with a background in strategy, sales, and growth, he has also served his local business community, including a term as chamber president through the pandemic. A good deal of the thinking behind how Azurite is put together comes from that experience.
Ger O'Mahony
Director
Ger is a co-founder of Azurite, with more than thirty-five years in technology behind him. He began by advising businesses on their technical and commercial strategy, then spent the decades since starting and building companies of his own, among them a software business and a networking systems integrator, across both software and managed IT. Today he helps established technology companies scale at home and abroad, and mentors other businesses along the way. That span, from strategy advisory to founding and scaling, is a large part of what shapes how Azurite is being built.
Chris O'Brien
Engineer
Chris brings current, hands-on grounding to the team. He holds a degree in computer networking and systems management and came up through frontline IT support and service-desk roles - the work where you learn quickly what actually goes wrong for people and how to put it right cleanly. More recently his focus has moved toward cloud and Azure administration. He pairs genuine technical curiosity with the patience that good support work is built on.
Jamie Tees
Principal Engineer
Jamie has spent more than a decade across cloud infrastructure, network security, and IT management. He specialises in secure, enterprise-grade Azure environments built with infrastructure-as-code, full-lifecycle virtual desktop deployments, and moving businesses off ageing on-premises systems onto modern cloud foundations. He leads engineering teams and designs infrastructure that scales cleanly with the business rather than needing to be unpicked later.
A word on the name...
Azurite is a deep-blue mineral, prized for centuries as the pigment behind the most vivid blues in Renaissance painting. It was also a prospector’s signal. Where azurite appeared at the surface, copper lay beneath.
That’s close to how we think about the work. The real value in a business’s technology usually sits under the surface, and it takes a careful look to find it. This is why we start every relationship with an assessment rather than a sales pitch. The kinship with Microsoft Azure is a happy accident, though it’s a fair clue to where our expertise sits.
Our Mission & Values
“To help forward-thinking businesses adapt their technology and their teams,
to grow securely and measurably in a changing world.”
Most companies list values nobody could argue with and nobody remembers, but ours are meant to be argued with. If one of them puts you off,
we’re probably not the right fit for each other, and it’s better we both know that now than later. Here’s what guides how we work.
Right Fit
We're deliberate about who we work with, because fit - whether commercial, cultural, human is the single biggest thing that decides whether an engagement works. That's not about being exclusive or precious. A business can be excellent and still not be right for us, just as we won't be right for everyone. Saying so honestly, in both directions, spares everyone the engagement that was never going to work.
Doing the
Right Thing
It's simpler to say than to hold to. It means telling you what something costs and why, up front. It means the honest answer when the news is uncomfortable, and our hand up early when something's gone wrong rather than a tidied-up version of events. It's the easiest value to print and the hardest to live so we'd rather you judged us on it than took our word for it.
Mindful
Not a wellness word, but a working discipline. Being deliberate about how time gets spent, yours and ours. Noticing when something's shifted - a client under pressure, a problem that's bigger than the ticket describes. Understanding what's actually wrong before reaching for a fix. It's the opposite of the autopilot that makes a client feel like a number and it's usually what people mean when they say we actually listened.
Fun
The one that gets misread, so we'll be plain about it: we don't mean cracking jokes all day. We mean that we spend too much of our lives at work for it to be a grind, and that people who enjoy what they do bring more care and more effort to it - the discretionary extra no process can mandate. When that enjoyment fades, something else has usually broken first - the wrong client, an unclear brief, a process that turns good people into script-followers. So we treat it as a signal worth watching. A motivated team isn't a soft benefit, it's the one you feel in the work we do for you.
Adaptability
Adaptability is direction without blinkers. The technology we work with is changing faster than it ever has, and AI is reshaping how the work itself gets done. We adopt what genuinely makes the work better and leave the rest. Being adaptable isn't chasing every new thing, it's staying open to change without losing the standards that make it worth doing.