IBM HAS chosen Dublin as the location for what it claims is the first cloud computing centre in Europe.
The initiative, which is supported by IDA Ireland, will ultimately employ over 20 staff but also cements Dublin as a strategic location within the corporation, say local IBM executives.
Although IBM has not revealed the investment involved, it is understood that it has attracted additional funding to the €46 million the company said it would invest in Dublin in 2006.
The new centre will provide research and other services around cloud computing to IBM specialists in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Cloud computing is a relatively new concept in the information technology sector. It refers to the dynamic sharing of centralised computing resources which are accessed as a service, either over the internet or via a corporate network. Some of the first applications have been in the area of academic research where large volumes of data needs to be processed during peaks of activity.
IBM has been investing heavily in the area for the last year and is providing cloud computing services to clients including China Telecom, China's Wuxi municipal government and Vietnam's ministry of science and technology.
Dr Willy Chiu, a vice president in IBM's Software Group, said the centre would have its own cloud computing infrastructure that would allow customers to quickly pilot "next generation applications" based on the technology.
One of the first services available to clients from the centre is called IBM Idea Factory for Cloud Computing, which uses the latest Web 2.0 technologies to allow business people to form social networks for the development of new business ideas.
Alex Ingle, a senior executive at IBM's Dublin campus, said Ireland had been chosen as the location for the centre due to the Dublin software lab's track record with Web 2.0 technology and the track record of local universities with "pervasive computing", a precursor to cloud computing.
"This puts us at the bleeding edge of technology innovation," said Mr Ingle.
"It is very important that we are playing at the forefront within IBM globally."
