EMC vice president Bob Savage
Cloud computing is the most significant transformation in the history of information technology (IT) and a critical component of Ireland’s economic recovery, EMC vice-president Bob Savage told a high-level science group in Dublin today.
Addressing Science Foundation Ireland’s (SFI) breakfast forum, ‘Science and Industry: Working Together for Economic Recovery’, Savage said Ireland can become a global hub for cloud and a beacon for innovation in the world.
“Cloud can be the next step in Ireland’s innovation journey and EMC is ready to play our part, in collaboration with Government, to help Ireland to take centre stage in what, according to the research firm Gartner, will be a US$149bn industry by 2015,” he said.
The breakfast forum was attended by the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Richard Bruton, and the Minister for Research and Innovation Seán Sherlock.
Savage said organisations globally will need to deal with 44 times more information each year over the next decade than they are managing today, according to the International Data Corporation.
“This explosion in the volume of all this information – known in the IT world as ‘big data’ – has consequences for how it is to be captured, stored, managed and analysed.
Ireland needs to seize big-data opportunity
“While cloud computing is transforming IT, data analytics is transforming the business environment – and Ireland needs to seize the big data opportunity now so that we can be first to market with technology that drives business intelligence,” Savage said.
He paid tribute to SFI for helping to bring together academia and enterprise, fostering the conversion of ideas and processes into new products and services and, most importantly, jobs.
“SFI is playing a key role in getting people thinking and working smarter, generating new ideas and getting more for less right across the economy.
“There is now strong engagement between SFI-funded researchers and the enterprise sector, not least in UCC where EMC researchers are working on campus with the Cork Constraint Computation Centre – or 4C – on cloud, data centre optimisation and data centre energy management initiatives,” Savage pointed out.
