"The internet was just starting to move into the main stream," says Rowe. "I had just sold a business so was free to look at what to do next. I had launched Cyberia, the world's first Cybercafé, and realised the time for a business like Easynet was right."

Following a flotation on the Alternative Investment Market in 1996, Easynet's focus on huge multi-national clients began to dominate its work. Today, now part of the media giant Sky following the takeover three years ago, Rowe's 1994 start-up has grown to become the international managed networks and hosting company Easynet Global Services. The group has 20 offices around the world, customers in 50 countries and delivers solutions to 194 states. Clients now include such huge names as Ford Motor Company, Kia Motors, Calor, Kellogg Italia and, of course, Sky.

A somewhat sticky moment for Rowe and Easynet came in 2002, when there was a phone call from a certain Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder of easyJet and a whole host of other 'easy' brands. Despite Easynet being around long before the orange lower case "easy" brand was established, Haji-Ioannou was sensitive to any competition from similarly sounding brands.

"We had already gained a general trademark, three or four years before his," remembers Rowe. "The word "easy" is hard to protect and when Stelios came to our offices we worked out a co-existence. He was always going to have great difficulty protecting the word and we soon came to an amicable conclusion."

It's not the only rocky path Easynet has had to tread. In 2001 the group became the first competitor in the Digital Subscriber Line market - DSL to you and me - to connect a customer to Easynet's own equipment at a BT local exchange and is now the UK's second largest network with 3,750 miles of fibre and last mile access to more than 70 per cent of UK businesses via a network of more than 1200 unbundled exchanges. But Rowe has had his ups and downs with BT over the years.

"We've had a chequered, but overall friendly, relationship with BT," he says. "We've shared a bumpy relationship but we're not at all anti-BT. Indeed we exist in a 'co-opetition' and we share many interests."

Last year the group created £159m in revenues, but Rowe is forecasting more than £200m this time round. Perhaps the leap in business has been as a result of pressure from Rowe's new ultimate boss James Murdoch, chairman of Sky. So how has life been since the group was taken over and Rowe handed his baby to the media giant?

"It's always a wrench when you change something, but we were always running a public company on behalf of our shareholders, so in that respect we're still doing that," he says.

"Even though Sky is a big company, it really is pretty entrepreneurial and I've never got the feeling of a large hierarchy of bureaucracy. It's never easy when you are used to running your own businesses, but I really enjoyed working with James. He takes people with him, even when implementing difficult change, and that's an excellent skill to have."

Rowe does not mince his words, and when it comes to his views on the economy and the present government, he's not exactly enthused with admiration for how Prime Minister Gordon Brown has handled the current crisis. But when it comes to discussing the UK in terms of a country to do business in, he's far more upbeat.

"People complain about red tape," he says. "But, in this country we have way less red tape than in the vast majority of countries. It's easy to start a business here and we have a great entrepreneurial culture. There has been a huge stigma about failure in the past, but over the next four or five years that will change."

And even during a recession, Rowe is confident of success.