McAfee secures Cork site for new operations centre


29 Oct 2004

Cork has received a jobs boost with the news that one of the world’s leading security software vendors McAfee is to establish a software operations centre, creating 152 jobs over the next three years.

The centre is being established with the support of IDA Ireland and will have a product development team established to carry out work on new products. Its operations will include multi-lingual product localisation as well as backoffice functions including financial shared services and operations for international markets.

The establishment of the centre follows restructuring by McAfee of a number of its global activities. Many of the jobs are coming out of the company’s EMEA shared serivces centre in Amsterdam. The company said that the jobs would initially be shared ruoghly equally between finance and engineering but as time goes on, employment will skew towards greater numbers of software engineers.

Brian Colbeck, senior vice president of finance with McAfee, confirmed to siliconrepublic.com that Cork would be “an integral member of the worldwide development team that we have”. He added that the jobs would call for high quality software engineers.

Announcing the investment, Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Micheál Martin TD, said: “This investment currently plans to create 152 knowledge-intensive software jobs over three years. Over 80pc of the jobs will require a third level qualification in disciplines such as software product development, engineering and localisation; finance and accounting and supply chain management.”

The newly appointed minister is spending a week in the US on a marketing mission with a delegation from IDA Ireland.

Founded in 1989, McAfee now employs 2,950 staff at several offices around the world. The company develops security software covering intrusion prevention, threat protection and risk management. For its 2003 financial year the Santa Clara-based company posted revenues of US$936m. The company had cash and marketable securities of US$1.1bn as of July this year.

The Cork operations centre will be McAfee’s first direct presence in Ireland, having been previously represented in a sales capacity by locally based partner companies. The company had also evaluated Dublin as a possible location for the centre. “We absolutely believe that the skills are there,” Colbeck asserted. In addition, third-level courses in the area had programmes around security. “Cost was also a factor, it was a little cheaper to do business in Cork than Dublin,” he added.

By Gordon Smith