Nostra

The futurist’s playbook: how Kevin O’Loughlin built Nostra into one of Ireland’s largest independent technology firms

Twenty years on from founding the company, Kevin O’Loughlin has built Nostra by betting early on the shifts the rest of the market saw later. The next chapter is more of the same: disciplined M&A, embedded AI, and continued regional investment.

The name was a statement of intent. Nostra is short for Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century seer credited with predicting the shape of things to come. Twenty years on from founding the business, Kevin O’Loughlin has earned the name. Nostra has spent its entire life looking further down the road than its competitors and acting on what it sees there.

By 2026 the scale of the business speaks for itself. The group employs around 300 to 350 people across four offices in Dublin, Cork, Galway and Belfast, turns over circa €50 million, and operates six service lines spanning managed services, connectivity, voice, security, print and AV. Its clients are mid-market Irish organisations across virtually every sector. By any reasonable measure, Nostra is one of the largest independent managed services providers in the country. How it got there, and where it goes next, is the more interesting story.

First to cloud, in 2008

O’Loughlin founded Nostra in 2006. By 2008, while most of the Irish IT services market was still selling on-premises infrastructure as the default, Nostra was already moving clients to the cloud. This was several years before cloud was a word any Irish CFO used comfortably, and many years before the larger consultancies built dedicated practices around it.

On paper, the timing was awful. The Irish economy was entering one of the worst recessions in its history. Clients were cutting, not investing. The conventional wisdom said retrench, not bet on a new delivery model.

Nostra bet anyway. The reasoning was simple in retrospect. Clients could not afford the capital expenditure of refresh cycles, but they still needed reliable infrastructure, and a subscription model that flexed with cash flow was a better answer for both sides. By the time the rest of the market caught up, Nostra had a head start measured in years and a portfolio of cloud-native client relationships that newer entrants were still trying to build.

That bet set the trajectory of the company and revealed the operating instinct that has defined Nostra ever since: identify the genuine shift early, strip out the hype, and move before the rest of the market does.

Building by acquisition

If the cloud bet was the strategic foundation, M&A built the house on top of it. From the mid-2010s onwards, Nostra moved deliberately from a single-line IT services business to a multi-service technology partner, and a meaningful share of that has been delivered through acquisition. Connectivity, voice, cybersecurity, print and audiovisual capabilities have each been added, in part or in whole, by bringing existing businesses inside the group rather than building from a standing start. The four-office regional footprint followed the same logic. A mid-market Irish company with sites in Cork or Belfast does not want a Dublin-only provider; it wants a partner with people on the ground in the same regions it operates in.

The approach has been disciplined rather than opportunistic. Each deal has had to satisfy the same handful of questions. Does it add the capability clients are already asking for? Does it bring people and a culture that can be integrated without breaking? Does it strengthen the proposition to the mid-market Irish customer specifically, rather than chase scale for its own sake? When the answer to all three has been yes, Nostra has moved. When it has not, Nostra has walked.

Integration is where this kind of strategy lives or dies, and it is the part of the playbook that gets the least airtime externally. The discipline at Nostra is to bring acquired businesses onto a single operating platform, a single brand, and a single accountable commercial relationship for the client, while preserving the technical specialism and the people who made the acquisition worth doing in the first place. It is harder than it sounds. It is also why Nostra today sits in a category of one or two in the Irish market: big enough to deliver the breadth of services mid-market clients want from a single partner, independent and Irish enough to do it with the accountability global system integrators struggle to match.

Practical AI, not theoretical AI

Alongside the M&A engine, the second strand of strategy in 2026 is AI. The gap between credible and incredible is wider here than in any other technology conversation. Every IT services firm in the country has an AI page on its website. Few have an AI capability that means anything to the mid-market client trying to make sensible decisions about it.

Nostra’s positioning is deliberately the opposite of the hype cycle. The focus is on what O’Loughlin describes, consistently, as practical AI: solutions deployed today that create measurable value inside Irish businesses, rather than slide-deck visions of what might be possible in five years. Process automation that genuinely removes work. Knowledge tools that make professional services teams faster. Security tooling that uses AI where it outperforms a human analyst and does not where it does not.

It is, in many ways, a continuation of the instinct that drove the cloud bet in 2008. The bias is toward action. The instinct is toward the future.

What comes next

The next chapter rests on three commitments. The first is to keep buying and building. Nostra continues to look actively at acquisitions that add capability, deepen specialist expertise, or take the regional footprint into new territory. The criteria are unchanged from the deals that got the company to its current scale, and the team running the programme is the same team that has executed and integrated previous transactions. Mid-market Irish businesses should expect a Nostra in two or three years that is materially broader and deeper than the one they see today.

The second is to move from useful AI pilots to embedded, productionised AI capability across every service line, so that practical AI stops being a separate conversation and becomes part of how every Nostra service is delivered. The third is to keep investing in the people, the four offices, and the regional model that makes the proposition credible, because the mid-market company in Galway or Belfast deserves the same depth of partner as the one in Dublin.

The instinct underneath all three is the one that has run through the company since 2008: identify the shift early, strip out the hype, and move before the rest of the market does. Listen to the market. Move early. Keep the name honest.

The name, it turns out, was the strategy all along.

Nostra is one of Ireland’s largest independent managed services providers, headquartered in Dublin with offices in Cork, Galway and Belfast. Founded in 2006 by Kevin O’Loughlin, the company partners with mid-market Irish organisations across managed services, connectivity, voice, security, print and AV.