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If you’ve been passing through Dublin Airport this week, you’ve probably noticed the Enterprise Ireland stand ‘ItsHappeningHere‘ and wondered what it’s all about. Click the video to find out about more than 2000 jobs with more than 600 Irish software companies.
If you’re not able to say hello to Anne, David, Rob, Jim, Alan , Jennifer or any of the other EI people taking their turn on the stand, pass on this link to a friend who is home for the holidays.
The “data cloud” spells enormous opportunity for Ireland. “Innovation Ireland” (the three Irish agencies responsible for developing Ireland’s capability in this area – Enterprise Ireland, IDA and Science Foundation Ireland) have teamed together with the Dublin Web Summit to host a major international event in Dublin entitled “Beyond The Cloud” taking place in the RDS on 27th October.
The cloud computing market is projected to grow to $150bn by 2013 (Gartner). It is estimated that over €7bn is spent on designing and building datacentres across Europe per annum (DCD). Demand for data storage is growing at over 40% per annum. A recent report from Goodbody Economic consultants notes that cloud computing sales by Irish based companies could reach €9.5bn per annum by 2014 and provide up to 8,600 jobs.
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Cloud computing is a key strategic focus for the Irish Government, and is a priority area for development and support. The IDA has ensured that Ireland is leading the way in global cloud computing investment as evident by recent investments by global leaders, who are making Ireland the centre for their cloud computing strategies (Amazon, IBM, Dell, Microsoft, Google, HP).
Irish companies have been behind the design, build and fit-out of these centres and other major international datacentres. 34 of these and other Enterprise Ireland client companies providing innovative solutions to help in the efficient and secure operation of these centres will meet over 100 international buyers invited by Enterprise Ireland to attend the event. These include global heads of Innovation and Technology at both Deutsche Telekom and Deutsche Bank, and senior decision makers from Telefonica, BT France, IBM, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, H&M and Mail.RU (Russia’s largest Internet Provider).
Key to the development of new cloud computing technologies is the presence of a supportive R&D collaborative environment and the development of innovative technologies underpinning the sector driven by Science Foundation Ireland researchers.
This unique ecosystem of multinational and indigenous expertise combined with significant research spend is helping to position Ireland as a leader in cloud and datacentre capability. “Beyond The Cloud” enables Ireland to further extend international recognition and position Ireland as a centre of excellence in this area: details of topics and speakers are available at http://www.dublinwebsummit.com/schedule#5. For more updates, keep an eye on #beyondthecloud on Twitter.
We’ve just spent the week working with the 13 Irish companies at the Enterprise Ireland Stand at Microsoft’s World Partner Conference in LA. That’s not counting the 20 or so other Irish Software companies that also attended the event. It’s a big conference (about 15,000 attendees from around the world) and the quality of the people that we met was equally impressive.
From an ‘Ireland Inc’ point of view, what struck me how many people that knew about our current economic situation, but also how many people knew about the shining star that is the Irish Software sector. Invariably, these conversations were followed by a question ‘how can we help?’.
On a more personal note, I wanted to capture my thoughts on what worked, what didn’t work for the companies while it’s still fresh in my mind;
