Written by Katherine Fox
To help celebrate ESO’s fifth anniversary Sync NI met with Eric Beck, President and CEO of ESO, who was instrumental in selecting Belfast as the location for an advanced Engineering Centre. As a Doctor, Eric has maintained his volunteer work with local EMS teams in his spare time.
Eric, a veteran in emergency services care who has extensive experience in both clinical and leadership positions within the healthcare sector, flew in specially from Austin Texas to address a town hall in the Belfast office and personally join in with the planned birthday celebrations.
Sync NI were joined by several of ESO’s local team in Belfast to explore how this ‘Tech for Good’ company is driving innovation in emerging technology to radically enhance the health outcomes of communities globally.
Eric Beck, President and CEO of ESO
About ESO
ESO’s Engineering Centre and Cyber Security Hub has grown rapidly and now employs over 150 staff with a vast array of skills and talents across the business including software engineering, product design and UX. Sync NI met with a cross section of individuals within the business who form part of the teams who make a real difference and positively impact people’s lives on a worldwide basis while working locally, yet for a global business. From founders involved from ESO’s inception to recent graduate hires, everyone contributed insights into their personal journey and what it feels like to work inside one of the most exciting and rewarding technology companies in Belfast.
Can you share your thoughts on the impact that technology being developed by ESO in Belfast is having on the healthcare sector?
Eric Beck, President and CEO
Our mission is to improve community health and safety through the power of data and the technology we’re developing here in Belfast is having a real impact across the globe.
READ MORE: ESO marks five years in Belfast with two new site leads
The applications we develop help our customers, who are first response organizations like fire departments, emergency services and hospitals, use data to improve health and safety in their communities.
Russell Beggs, SVP Engineering
One of the things that really excites me is not just what we’re doing today, but the potential of what we can do with new and emerging technologies in the future.
For example, it’s crucial to capture patient care data in order to provide analytics and insight. We want to make sure that process is as seamless as possible, so that care providers can do their main jobs properly. We are moving away from pen and paper or keying data into devices, and looking at how we can streamline the entire process by using technology like speech to text, AI and automation. It is really exciting because when you think about the constraints on resources both in the NHS and around the world, this is how I believe that we can really make a difference.
MT McCann, Director of User Experience
It is so important that we make it as easy as possible for people to interact with our products, and we’re getting better at that all the time.
When I came on board four years ago, we had just one designer working across all our products, but now our UX team has grown to seven designers with five based in Belfast. We’ve really been continuing to develop that UX muscle over the last few years, with more data and analysis of how users are stepping through our products.
Sync NI: ESO Innovation Hub is celebrating five years in Belfast. Can you talk about some of the highlights of this journey?
Laura Gilmour, Software Engineer
I came in as a graduate, and it's been four years of learning an insane amount. You come in, you learn, and then you grow and contribute. Being able to mentor the placement students and graduates that have come in is really satisfying.
Knowing that what I'm doing is helping people for the greater good - even if it's as simple as turning a three hour task into a job that we run for them at night so that they never have to think about it again - it’s those little things that make their experience better which are a highlight for me.
Dani McCutcheon, Product Designer
I came to ESO as part of my university placement and when I started, I was so shy and reserved. I couldn't stand up and talk in front of people, especially in a professional setting. Then, one year in, I found myself going to advocate for the users, and then a year after that, I was holding user calls and talking to paramedics and firefighters and all these really great people, advocating for them and making sure that their needs are met. So I feel like I've come a really long way, and that's been my favourite part of it.
READ MORE: UK Emergency Services Day: Just 1 in 5 cardiac arrests receive bystander CPR
Russell Beggs
It’s going to sound a little bit cliche, but this moment is one of the highlights for me. Just hearing the impact ESO is having on people’s lives is a really rewarding experience. There have been numerous highlights along the way, and it's often easy to forget what those are when you're facing all the challenges. But it's also wonderful to hear how we’re having an impact on people’s lives, and how colleagues feel they are having the opportunity to have a positive impact for others.
Stuart Cave, Development Manager
Following on from the lows of covid and having to adapt the way we worked, a high point is this great new office space we are working out of now. It’s like leadership’s investment in Belfast. For me personally, I've been able to spend a lot of time developing the next talent coming through the pipelines and it’s fantastic to have seen the growth of the company in such a short time to more than 100 people in Belfast alone.
Jonathan Cummings, Chief Information Security Officer
Since we started five years ago, healthcare across the world has become the industry most likely to be attacked for financial gain. We've been quite fortunate to have been able to build an entire cybersecurity function that operates out of Belfast. It’s grown over the past 18 months to two years from nothing to a team of 14 who are actively protecting paramedics and implementing all of this security technology into the products in a frictionless way so that the users don't even notice it’s there.
We've now got a dedicated security work stream and presentation track within our waveconference, which is our global customer conference. We also have customer security teams coming to ESO to learn from us, and we've been able to contribute to some of the biggest international cyber intelligence sharing forums. It’s all happened in a very short period of time, so it's been a huge accomplishment for us here in Belfast.
Russell Beggs
It was really important for me, whenever we started in Belfast, that we weren't just an engineering shop. I think the original premise of ESO was that we would have cross functional teams with the design top to bottom to make sure we get the right outcomes and answers. Making sure we hire the right product people has always been super important and that's continued to grow.
Jonathan Cummings
As an innovation hub for the healthcare sector, this obviously involves enormous amount of collaboration across teams with diverse skill sets. Can you summarize the various functions the key roles perform?
MT McCann
As director of UX, a big part of my role is shaping the UX strategy and making sure that our designers and our product teams are aligned. On top of that, I’m building a really strong UX team with advanced skills across the board, from collaboration and other soft skills to the best in UI design and usability testing.
It’s important that the team has different levels of experience so that we can bring the placement students in from the really strong courses that we have in Belfast. Then we have our capable senior designers bring them through to full-time employment, identifying the people that really will excel in ESO.
Something that I’m really proud of is how we’re improving the accessibility of our products. It's important that everybody can use our suite of products at any time of day, no matter what their ability or the situation they're in. Our design team and engineering partners are leading us on a path to improve accessibility that’s built into our strategy to ensure that we're meeting those guidelines.
Stuart Cave
As an engineering manager, I work with security and product design to deliver projects. But the other part of my job is people management - looking after the people on my team, making sure they're feeling happy and supported, and all that sort of good stuff.
Dani McCutcheon, Product Designer
As a product designer, my role focuses on finding out where our technology can really help the user. We’re always asking how we can save them time and how we can remove any friction that technology is causing in their jobs.
We bridge that gap between the user and our developers who are engineering the product. It's always about speaking to the user first, and then once we figure out a solution, making sure that aligns with our wider business goals.
READ MORE: Roundtable event explores why do FDI's invest in Belfast?
Jonathan Cummings
Every single element of our work requires a security consideration, but it’s impossible to have a big enough security team to have eyes everywhere they are needed. So we’re trying to create a culture of getting people across other teams to look out for these things themselves, and then come to the security team for technical guidance and assistance whenever they need it. It's been great to work with a team like the one in Belfast, where we built that whole culture from scratch and it has worked really well.
Eric Beck
I think it’s worth sharing an observation that it’s not by accident that two of our senior executives for the entire global enterprise are based out of the Belfast office. It’s a testament to what has been growing here, but also how we want to continue to invest in Belfast, which has been a wonderful proving ground for everything from engineering and cyber security to product, UX and other areas.
Russell Beggs
If we think about what software engineers or designers or product people do today, it’s very different from what these same job roles were five years ago, let alone 10 or 15 years ago, so having the right people who have the right attitude about growth and learning and wanting to improve is really important. The skills of tomorrow are not the same as the skills of today, but the right attitude carries people through.
ESO is the classic example of Tech for Good. Is this the main driver for why people come to work here?
Steph Murray, Manager of Talent Acquisition
Definitely. When I tell people about our products and the impact they have, they just light up and they get excited. I don’t think there’s anything else in Belfast that has that kind of impact.
MT McCann
We can all see how our own healthcare system is under severe pressure and stress, and that is a big driver for me. I feel like I can make a difference by taking pressure off the healthcare service and helping them be better at their roles. Hopefully people like me and my family and friends will get to feel the impact of that someday, if ESO gets more customers in the UK and Ireland and we see that global impact as we grow.
We want to attract more people who are really ‘bought into’ our mission and our passion for making a difference for the users we serve.
Dani McCutcheon
The next five years at ESO
Eric stressed that while ESO will continue to enhance their products in a customer centric way, they will be embracing new technology including generative AI, and putting the data to work to drive greater predictions for those on the frontline of healthcare.
Due to the ongoing success of the business, ESO are increasingly finding themselves serving a larger global customer base, and for Belfast this inevitably means a growing headcount to continue working with communities around the globe to improve health and safety outcomes. The ESO Engineering Centre in Belfast will quite literally be acting locally with global awareness.
Read Sync NI's free online autumn magazine Celebrating a Decade of Big Data Belfast here.
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