IBM's Irish technology campus, at Mulhuddart in West Dublin

Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Micheál Martin, TD, today announced that IBM is to establish Europe's first Cloud Computing Centre, with the support of IDA Ireland. The new centre is to be located at the IBM Innovation Campus at Mulhuddart, West Dublin. It is expected that 21 people will work in the Centre, of which 9 will be focused on research in the area of cloud computing.

The Centre will serve as a European hub to provide research and services to a number of satellite facilities to be built in Europe, Middle East and Africa. IBM experts will work directly with clients in the region, helping them adopt cloud computing solutions that spur technology research and business development.

The need for cloud computing is fuelled by the dramatic growth in business collaboration, connected devices, real-time data streams, and Web 2.0 applications such as streaming media and entertainment, social networking and mobile commerce.

Using Web 2.0 technology, IBM Idea Factory, one of the Dublin centre's first offerings to clients allows communities of business professionals to be assembled into social networks to facilitate the development of new business ideas. IBM Idea Factory for Cloud Computing captures business processes - from their beginnings as ideas to commercialization - speeding up brainstorming among employees, partners, software developers and other third party participants.

Speaking at today's announcement Martin said: “The selection of Ireland as the location for IBM's European hub for Cloud Computing highlights Ireland's role as an important contributor to IBM's global research, development and innovation strategy. The investment further establishes IBM Ireland's growing reputation as a high performance computing centre within IBM Corporation. IDA Ireland and IBM have a proactive long-standing relationship in advancing the Irish business and the implementation of strategic high value knowledge based research and development investments.”

“Our investments in cloud computing are a prime example of how IBM is seeking out emerging global market opportunities and new computing models that benefit IBM clients," said Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive, IBM Software Group. "Through this new facility and the cloud computing model, the wealth of talent at IBM's software lab in Ireland will be accessible to not only the rest of Europe, but Africa and the Middle East as well."

Cloud computing is an attractive proposition for small to large-sized companies. It also is a green technology model that reduces energy consumption by improving IT resource utilization, therefore requiring fewer servers to handle equivalent workloads.

"Responding to demand in the market, we are moving fast to build an integrated cloud computing operation. We are adding Europe's first Cloud Computing Centre at Dublin and more facilities into a network of existing centres in China, Vietnam and the U.S. The centres can bring skills and expertise to serve our clients in building their own new enterprise data centres," said Dr. Willy Chiu, Vice President of High Performance On Demand Solutions, IBM Software Group. With such a network of centres, Dr. Chiu pointed out, "We will also address the need for open interoperability standards."

IBM High Performance on Demand Solutions Lab will work with IDA Ireland to build this centre using IBM's “Blue Cloud” technologies, a series of cloud computing offerings based on industry open standards and open source software. IBM Tivoli systems management software will manage the Cloud Computing environment.

The centre will place a focus on innovation and research activities. As part of its ongoing educational initiatives, IBM has also agreed to facilitate cloud computing training for lecturers at the Dublin Institute of Technology's School of Computing. The training will help the school to foster new skills that meet the needs of this emerging computing model.