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13 years since we’ve been here, there’s been a massive transformation. It was already well underway, there were great plans, it was one of the reasons we chose the area; we wanted to have a city centre location. We demonstrated that you could build a rapidly scaling international business from Barrow Street that could work with advertisers and users large and small, right across the Middle East and Africa. The key to being able to do that was getting talent and we found that when we went out looking for the top talent across those markets, we were able to sell the proposition of Google but also the proposition of Dublin as being an
technical services around cybersecurity – how do we house data, organise it, transmit it, create value out of it – and the story goes on. We feel that we have a beachhead in terms of this but we’ve a lot of work to do as Ireland Inc in order to be able to build on that. The interesting thing about the world of data is that scale is what gives it value in many instances and by having a consolidated hub like Ireland, like Dublin, where a lot of this flows through, you will get the value of the ecosystem building around that skilled hub and that is the opportunity that we’ve got to capitalise on.”
attractive place to spend a few years at least. We’ve seen this stream come through and we’ve now got this incredible digital hub with the leading ‘born on the web’ companies who’ve all got their European headquarters here and it’s become this data hub.
We are at the dawn of the data age. I’ve got a view that data is going to be the first man-made natural resource of the next couple of decades. Today, we are right at the nexus of that, it’s still a little bit unclear exactly what will data mean, how we are going to shape it, what is the ecosystem, what needs to happen. With any great opportunity it’s about recognising what it is, getting some smart people around the table to figure it out and building an ecosystem with lots of different facets to make sure that we can consolidate what is already an amazing head start for Ireland.”
Getting the right mix of companies is paramount. “Absolutely. Like any ecosystem, if you get it right it is self-sustaining and will grow organically and rapidly. When you start to think through what does data actually involve, it really is a rich tapestry. It’s everything from the regulatory environment: we’ve made great strides over the last year or two but how do we continue to make sure the regulatory environment is respected and revered across Europe? How do we make sure that the judiciary is one that sets the standard for the new issues that are going to arrive regularly in the world of data as it evolves? We need to have the education system, not just in terms of the undergraduates but also the academic research, if we are going to be a leading global hub in the world of data. We then move into professional services, the
With that in mind, you are building another data centre here. “We have a second data centre investment underway in West Dublin and that will launch later on this year, significantly larger than the last one, groundbreaking on a whole bunch of different fronts. Ireland is a place where we could test new technologies and innovate and this new data centre is our largest air cooled data centre in our fleet and our climate plays into that – it’s great to be able to say the Irish weather is good for something! We’ve seen over the last year or so lots of other companies who’ve made significant data centre announcements for Ireland so clearly it’s for the physical infrastructures. “In ten years’ time, we’ll look back at 2016 and we’ll wonder how we made decisions because we had so little insight from so little data today. We’re just about to launch into this world of Internet of Things where every company is going to be able to generate data streams from aspects of the business that they’ve never been able to before and that’s going to give a level of insight for them to be able to innovate and develop that they’ve never had. Technology will start to get out of the way. Up until this point, technology has worked only if we pressed the button and told it what to do and going forward, technology will understand our patterns and start to do that work for us. One of the great data opportunities we have been working on is how we alert small businesses to the opportunity of export. If you’re working with our teams we will look at our data and know that people are looking for your product or service in markets which are similar or adjacent, and we can help you understand what it would take to sell into that market. It’s turned into a massive engine for growth for those companies.”
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