Waterford IT company HCS is investing €3.2 million and expects to add 30 jobs in the next three years as it seeks to double its revenues.
The company is hiring across cybersecurity, business applications, telecoms, and managed services — areas it says have seen high growth. The additional 30 jobs will effectively double its workforce.
HCS provides securely managed IT, telecoms and productivity services to businesses.
Chief executive Neil Phelan said the investment was in response to “unprecedented demand” for its services and skills, and the company has seen significant evolution in recent years.
“There’s two areas where we see major growth in our business: one is the whole telecom space. We see the growth opportunity in telecom as being huge over the next number of years as people make that transition from traditional PBX and copper wire system over on to fibre,” Mr Phelan said. “The other area is digital transformation and the software side of things.”
HCS said it expected to reach revenues of €9 million by 2025 as a result of the expansion, and allow it to offer new services to customers. The funding is coming from its own sources.
“It’s money that we’ve set aside, and have built up over the years and we feel now the time is right to invest back into the business. IT, security and all the different digital transformation — the tide is rising on all of that. So we feel it’s now time to actually invest the funds that we have within the business back into it and catch that rising tide.”
The company has opened a third office in Cork as a result of the investment, with a base in Dublin too, and recruitment is underway for the new roles. HCS is also creating roles for Microsoft software and business application developers across Power Platform and Dynamics, and will also be hiring for project managers and consultants to underpin its Microsoft capabilities.
Mr Phelan said the company was confident it would be able to attract the right skills for the jobs, especially given the flexible nature of the roles. “Covid has changed the opportunities in terms of employees or attracting the right people,” he said, saying previously roles would have been centred around its Waterford and Dublin hubs. “There is nothing to stop personnel from attracting people in Dublin and Galway, or even outside of the country. For us we feel the pool is actually broader than those and Covid has probably introduced that.
He acknowledged however that this was a double-edged sword, with employees currently working with the company also able to work elsewhere as a result.
