CASE STUDY
Why firms are being drawn to Ireland Irish Charms By Annette Murphy, Business Development Director, Geo Networks
Annette Murphy examines why firms are being drawn to Ireland, data centre demand and drivers for connectivity.
Introduction Since the days of the ‘Celtic Tiger’, Ireland has become home to hundreds of top international businesses including 8 of the top 10 global ICT companies. Offering excellent proximity to European markets it is especially well positioned for US-based businesses looking for onward connectivity to the EMEA region. As more and more organisations establish a base in Ireland, rising volumes of data are flowing in and out of the country, storage requirements are growing and the data centre market is booming.
Track Record According to IDA Ireland, Ireland is the number one location for over 1,000 of the world’s most successful businesses. An international hub for a variety of business sectors , it hosts the top ten ‘born on the internet’ companies including Twitter, Google, eBay/PayPal and Facebook and three of the top six games companies. In addition, more
than 50 percent of the world’s financial services firms now have operations in the country. The country offers a skilled
technology workforce with 60 percent of Irish people going on to higher education and has the highest proportion of science and engineering graduates in the OECD. Many international firms are attracted by the ability to locate their European operations in a country with native English speakers. A key differentiator for Ireland is the fact it’s the only native-English speaking country to have adopted the Euro.
Location, Location Dublin provides an excellent meet- me point for organisations looking for connectivity between the US and Europe; and as a technology cluster, Ireland is considered by many observers to be unparalleled in Europe. As an island it has developed a resilient and redundant network of fibre to the US, EMEA and in 2014, Iceland. More recently it has benefitted from a number of new subsea optical fibre networks providing diverse links to the UK.
Cost of Business Locations such as Ireland and Scandinavia are up and coming regions for business and data centres because of welcoming fiscal regimes. As well as offering one of the lowest levels of corporation tax worldwide and relatively low costs for real-estate, Ireland also offers companies locating there, green incentives, tax breaks and tax credits for research and development. Ireland has more than 68 double taxation treaties with countries around the world in place.
Subsea fibre optic cable connects Wales to Dublin. 34 NETCOMMS europe Volume III Issue 3 2013
Demand Data centres have been a part of Ireland’s digital fabric since the 1980s. High speed internet, Web 2.0, and the information explosion together with market transformations in many industries are driving exponential growth in demand for cloud-based data centres as traditional physical servers
fail to compete. Key industries, such as technology, media and telecoms, online retail and gaming, and financial services require high capacity data centres and Ireland’s services, centred around the Dublin area, continue to grow. In deciding where to locate, companies face a trade-off between finding a cost-effective location to store all their data, against the need for low latency if they need rapid access to that data. Dublin is proving a popular location for data storage in the gaming industry and is catering to the growing need for storage and private data centres where business continuity is paramount. Ireland is also well positioned to cater to the needs of large US organisations that are seeking data centre sites in Europe to help reduce the costs of data transit back to the US and to improve their resilience by distributing their data storage across three or four data centres around the world.
Green Credentials Research shows that UK data centres consume 6.4 gigawatts of power annually—enough to power 6 million homes. Consumption is set to increase by 6.7 percent over the next 12 months. Such concerns may fuel alarms around enterprises using ‘dirty energy’ to power their data centres increasing the appeal of locations such as Ireland where 95 percent of the time the temperature outdoors is ideal for computer servers. The mild climate helps companies make substantial savings on energy bills in data centres compared to other countries. Green credentials are increasingly
important for corporates across many industries to protect their reputation and to demonstrate corporate social responsibility. Many locations make a play on their energy efficiency and Ireland continues to decrease its annual dependence on fossil-based primary sources of fuel with wave energy emerging together with wind farms as a key source of renewable energy.
Connectivity Ireland has seen significant investment over the last few years. The majority of this new investment has been aimed
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