About Protego

The Protego team brings experience in starting, extending, and transforming technology organizations to deliver significant business value. We have extensive software design, development, and implementation experience in a range of domains including financial services, data, and technology. Our functional expertise is complemented by our deep technical knowledge and our capabilities in multiple disciplines such as Project Management, Business Analysis and Quality Assurance.

Leadership Team

Paul O'Dwyer

Director and Co-Founder

Paul is a senior executive experienced in starting, growing and managing software development, professional services and consulting organizations. He has worked directly with some of the largest global financial services institutions and technology companies and has managed multiple, distributed teams consisting of onshore, offshore and partner resources to successfully deliver solutions.

With over 30 years' experience in technology, primarily in leadership roles, he knows what it takes to build a culture of success and high-performance with engaged, enthusiastic teams. Coupled with his experience managing all aspects of the day-to-day running of a business, he brings a thorough understanding of what it takes to develop a successful technology organization.

Most recently, Paul started a Research & Development Center for a US multinational data company, and in just 3 years grew the organization from a small core team to almost 200 highly skilled team members.

Stephen Gaughan

Director and Co-Founder

Stephen is a technical leader with over 25 years of experience, primarily in the financial services industry.

As an enterprise architect, he delivers technical strategy and leadership to the management team, assessing the suitability of existing architectures and coupling innovation with measurable business value by driving the selection of appropriate technologies, designs and tools.

Stephen empowers self-managing technical teams, guiding them with appropriate levels of oversight and governance to ensure consistency and regulatory compliance, and can build or transform those teams to deliver cost-effective, reliable, always-on services to meet the needs of the business. He understands what’s needed to establish a culture of quality, continuous learning and process improvement.

Stephen has experience delivering solutions to traditional data centers and to cloud platforms including AWS and Azure. His cloud experience leverages the key advantages of the cloud, including multi-region reliability, auto-scaling of capacity to meet fluctuations in demand, and global data replication using cloud-native storage. Key to this is using cloud tools and best practices to establish full automation of deployment pipelines, which enables continuous delivery of enhancements to live services.

Owen Murphy

Director and Co-Founder

Owen, an MBA graduate of Trinity College Dublin, is an experienced creator and leader of technical teams, with over 20 years’ working in IT at many levels including developer, architect, and project and portfolio management. Building teams with a focus on fast, iterative development and delivery is what he is passionate about, especially in a startup or transformational context where cultural norms can be set or reset in line with lean and agile principles of business operation.

Owen brings immediate value by identifying team inefficiencies and implementing improvements through process mapping of the build, deploy, and maintain operations, introducing end-to-end automation where possible to reduce errors and their associated overheads, and overseeing on-time delivery.

For the last four years Owen has managed a portfolio of projects across geographically dispersed teams for a US multinational data company, targeting on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments.