printing business, the low-end chip business and concentrated on software and services, which remain our main areas of focus today.”
The concept of convergence is also something with which the higher echelons of IBM’s management are very familiar.
“We secured major investment here in Ireland from the corporation, re-skilled our staff and moved up the value chain. Today for example, what was the consumer support call-centre, is now a highly skilled sales and marketing centre. The Irish office now actually leads the way globally in many areas, guiding and advising the corporation regarding software and development. This is a significant transformation”, asserts the managing director, “we are very active in the research space and this is something that Ireland facilitates because it is such a good environment to test-bed new models”.
“With the rapid onset of technological advances and the areas that IBM is active in, convergence with other industries has become a necessity. Our interest in smarter cities and smarter energy means that we have to collaborate with utility companies such as the ESB, in order to have access to their information flows – this is another area in which the Irish ecosystem has facilitated us.”
“Ireland has all of the complexities of a sophisticated market”, determines O’Neill, “but the difference here is that it is smaller in scale. This means that on any given project, you can get all of the relevant stakeholders around the table quickly, and test pilot schemes in the marketplace quite easily.”
“Medical devices, another field that Ireland is strong in, is a sector with which we converge also – and the future benefits of combining advanced technology with medical devices is clear.” So, how would O’Neill ultimately sum-up Ireland as a base for a multinational company?
One such project is IBM’s “Smarter Cities Technology Centre”, an innovative series of projects concerning the allocation of resources in accordance with information. It concerns millions of tiny internet-connected sensors that monitor information flows in real time throughout an increasing number of facets of daily life. Smarter energy, smarter water, smarter health, smarter transport and smarter education are the five key areas of this extensive programme that is set to change the way urban centres are developed in the future.
“Ireland as a whole? I think its big plus is its people. The fact that they are open to change is of real benefit to a major corporation. Of course, we’ve eroded some of our price competitiveness over the last five years, and as a result, there are some missions that will never come back to Ireland, but I think that the competitiveness issue is fixing itself now, and we as a country are set to move higher up the value chain. The skilled, educated and English-speaking workforce, along with the attractive tax regime and stable political climate are all positive factors. For a corporation, the importance of knowing that even if there is a change in government, there will not be any major changes to policy, cannot be underestimated”.
The sophisticated but small environment that Ireland provides enables open collaboration with the universities, which facilitate the development of these state-of-the-art programmes. This is an area in which IBM is active, going as far as to assemble a venture capital team who bring projects over the line from incubation stage.
“In terms of the support that we have received, I can say unequivocally that our experience with IDA Ireland has been superb. Locally, we hold them in the highest esteem and I know that that is a feeling that is shared throughout the corporation as a whole. We have worked with them a lot and it has been uniformly positive.”
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