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 b ut 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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