Microsoft Ireland is planning to locate all of its electronic commerce hosting facilities for Europe, the Middle East and Africa in Dublin, in a move which will see it relocate a number of pilot projects for business-to-business electronic commerce from London to Dublin. It is understood data hosting will form a central plank of Microsoft's newly unveiled .NET strategy.
The Irish Times has learned a global name telehouse - facility to house powerful computer servers for electronic commerce - will open at the Citywest Digital Park in a number of weeks, and one of its first flagship customers will be Microsoft.
The decision to relocate business-to-business e-commerce projects from London to Dublin follows a reassessment by Microsoft's internal Information Technology Group of Ireland's telecommunications bandwidth capacity. It is understood Ireland was always the preferred location for Microsoft's server hosting requirements, but two years ago it did not have the capability to meet Microsoft's bandwidth requirements.
Microsoft chief executive officer, Mr Steve Ballmer, told The Irish Times it was possible Microsoft might move its transaction hosting facilities from London to Dublin, but would not elaborate.
"The Irish Government is doing a good job incentivising people to move e-commerce hosting operations to Ireland. I know they have now invested a lot in communications bandwidth there. We will need to host the building blocks for the new .NET platform, and we acknowledge the enthusiastic pursuit of the Irish Government," Mr Ballmer said.
Although the initial investment will be moderate and centre largely on Microsoft's internal electronic transactions within the EMEA region, the longer term strategy is expected to attract significant Microsoft investment in Ireland, and additional investment from key Microsoft partners who distribute its popular application software.
"As the details of .NET start to roll out over the next 24 months we can expect to see a number of business-to-business projects located in Ireland, which will definitely amount to significant investments over time," says Mr Kevin Dillon, managing director of Microsoft's European operations centre in Dublin:
Two years ago Ireland lost a significant strategic Microsoft investment when it chose to locate its corporate website (www.microsoft.com) mirror site for EMEA in London after the internal Information Technology Group found Ireland did not have sufficient competitively priced bandwidth to accommodate it.
The decision was a blow to the Government and the IDA at the time, and is understood to have been one of the key drivers of the Government's acceleration of the telecommunications deregulation timetable.
The new .NET strategy aims to make Microsoft software available anytime, anywhere on any device through Internet technology.
Microsoft will distribute this software electronically to partner companies through electronic transactions, and in turn the partner companies will perform data hosting services for end users who will pay for the delivery of personalised software to a range of devices as they use it.
All of these functions require centralised pockets of high speed computing power and telecommunications capability to distribute large amounts of data around networks. The Citywest Digital Park telehouse is expected to perform this function for Microsoft's requirements within the EMEA region.
