This is a guest post from Liz McCarthy, Business Development Manager at Annadale Technologies in Kerry. Aside from taking part in the ITsHappening here software jobs in Ireland promotion, Liz talks through some of the ways they kickstart non-IT students into jobs in the Software Industry. And if you’re interested in working at Annadale, find out more on their Jobs page.
In response to the limited availability of talented programmers graduating from Irish Universities (and the parallel trend of large multinationals handpicking the top students from relevant disciplines), we at Annadale Technologies decided to address the source of the problem – the tendency of high-achieving pupils opting for high-points courses such as Medicine and Law on their CAO, rather than technology courses such as Engineering and Computer Science.
We felt that this tendency is linked with the fact that most young Irish people are not exposed to the technology which powers the gadgets they use every day, as the standard of IT education in the Irish classroom leaves a lot to be desired. We felt that as part of our mission of growing our Kerry-based software company we should reach out to students and demonstrate to them first hand how exciting and fulfilling a career in software development can be.
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CoderDojo, ItsHappeningHere, Jobs, Potential Exporters, Technology
 We missed a significant birthday last week. On the 16th June 1911 the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation was formed through the merger of four companies: The Tabulating Machine Company, The Computing Scale Company, The International Time Recording Company and The Bundy Manufacturing Company. Shortened to CTR the company manufactured a wide range of products, including employee time-keeping systems, weighing scales, automatic meat
slicers, coffee grinders and punched card equipment.
Based in New York City, the new company had 1,300 employees and offices and plants in Endicott and Binghamton, New York; Dayton, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Washington, D.C.; and Toronto, Ontario. In 1914 the owner of CTR, Charles R. Flint, hired the number two executive from NCR, Thomas J Watson to manage the business. NCR had already been around for 30 years by this time! It was he who introduced the famous company slogan “THINK”. And it was he who on February 14, 1924 formally changed the name of the company to International Business Machines Corporation, later to be abbreviated IBM.
As with many things in life one has to wonder how many of our current generation of companies will become centenarians?
At some point in their life entrepreneurs need money. Many would say at all points in their life. And when they need it they could use lots of it. They talk about what they could achieve if they had millions at their disposal. This inevitably leads to them to consider Venture Capitalists. We all know the stories about entrepreneurs who raise €5m and sell their company a few short years later for a €100m. What it is about these select few entrepreneurs that makes them successful in raising venture capital?
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 Since man learnt to communicate we have sought advice from each other. Take food, at a young age we look for reassurance before we put something new in our mouth, later we ask what does something taste like before we eat it, from our late teens we look for advice on restaurants before booking them and later still we like to wax lyrically on food and drink to try and impress and get our view accepted. We like to hear ourselves talk, especially if we are Irish. That is why the internet is so attractive. It offers a big audiences, it compares views and polls opinions. How many of us will book a hotel now without checking out Trip Advisor, eBookers, Roomex, etc. (more…)
 According to AMI-Partners, small and medium business spending in the U.S. on software-as-a-service (SaaS) will increase exponentially over the next five years, eclipsing growth in investments in on-premise software by a significant margin. AMI forecasts a 25% CAGR in hosted business application services spending through 2014. This will come against a modest 5% uptake for all other categories of on-premise software combined. However, this growth will not be uniformly spread across all hosted applications. Mature applications such as ERP, SCM, procurement, finance, and core HR will turn over more slowly than those that are less saturated and have lower switching costs. (more…)
I was in London on Wednesday and got up early to attend a breakfast briefing on social media – “Social Media – How to use Social Networking to connect with your customers”. The first thing that struck me was that of the five companies that presented, three were Irish and one was Irish based. Are we developing a leadership in this area?
There was a lot of statistics thrown around at the event, but they were the type we all love to quote. For example:
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For those people who don’t subscribe to our American blog you will have missed the following notification.
As part of International Markets Week Enterprise Ireland is proud to offer a series of Webinars (September 28-October 1) led by experts from a variety of fields.
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 Dogs welcome is a strange introduction to the opening, next weekend, of the UK’s first new high street bank in over 150 years. The newcomer is Metro Bank. It promises to open seven days a week, including 8am to 8pm Monday to Friday, have a rapid account opening procedure and issue credit and debit cards within 15 minutes. For those with jars full of pennies it will also have free coin counting with the Metro Bank Magic Money Machine. And off course “the bank will provide free bowls of water and chewy bones to ensure that your four-legged pals are as happy as you are”! The initial plans are modest. Two branches this year and twelve within the next two years.
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 In the middle of our doom and gloom a bit of good news is always welcome. Intel last night reported its best ever quarter results in its 42 year history. Year-on-year revenue up 34% and a net income of €2.9bn. Why is this good news for us? Well, Paul Otellini, chief executive, said that Intel was running ahead of a global economic recovery because of a fundamental shift towards working on the internet. Sales of server chip were up 170% on a year earlier due to a move to hosting applications and services in the cloud. ”As internet traffic continues to boom, the cloud build-out is accelerating in order to keep pace,” he said.
So the move to the cloud continues unabated and confirms what many of Enterprise Ireland’s software clients believe – that SaaS and the cloud are here to stay.
We should also not forget the 4,000 people who work directly for Intel in Leixlip and the many hundreds of others whose jobs depend on Intel Ireland. This is great news for them.
For those of us of a certain generation it is hard to imagine that the Leixlip plant was originally established to produce the i486 microprocessor. A breakthrough in technology, it had a 50MHz chip set with 8k of on-chip SRAM!!!
McKinsey & Co. have just published an article highlighting the five significant changes that they see will restructure the world economy for the foreseeable future. They believe that companies that understand them will stand the best chance of shaping it.
For much of the past year, a team at McKinsey has revisited and retested their assumptions about the key global trends that will define the coming era. They have identified five forces, or crucibles, where the stresses and tensions will be greatest and thus offer the richest opportunities for companies to innovate and change:
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