One of the top 10 software companies in the world, Attachmate Corporation, which is the largest privately held firm of its kind in the US, has opened a state-of-the-art technical support centre at Shannon, writes Arthur Quinlan.

Mr Bill Patterson, vice-president in charge of worldwide sales marketing and support, said at the opening this week that with IBM his company shares slightly more than 80 per cent of a £1.04 billion business market. Its revenue, he said, is in excess of £215 million and of the 60 employees at Shannon, more than half are third-level graduates and that figure is continuing to rise.

The centre at Shannon will provide technical support for Attachmate customers throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It includes an automated telephone call distribution system said to be the first of its kind in the west of Ireland which channels incoming telephone calls to specific support engineers, depending on their availability, product and linguistic expertise. The company caters for eight languages in its direct dealing with customers.

Attachmate, which was founded 16 years ago in Washington State, provides software which enables personal computer users to access information on host computers. The company took over Digital Communications Associates at Shannon in 1994.