The new Boole Business Labs will be located appropriately enough at UCC
Enterprise IT giant EMC and University College Cork have jointly invested in the new Boole Business Labs facility, which aims to help regulated European businesses achieve digital transformation.
Boole Business Labs is Europe’s first industry-led research centre that lets regulated businesses in industries such as financial services, biopharma, health services, telecoms and ICT ensure they become innovative while remaining compliant with industry regulations when rolling out new technologies, like cloud and mobile.
The centre will be officially opened by Minister Dara Murphy at an event in UCC today (13 November) and will focus on IT business systems integrity, risk analysis, including cybersecurity, and innovation in regulated industries.
The Boole Business Labs is located in the O’Rahilly Building in the Cork University Business School (CUBS) at University College Cork and will be run by a team of researchers at UCC.
Boole Business Labs to bring European firms up to speed with digital
“In today’s digital world, keeping pace with technological advancements and compliance standards poses serious challenges for highly regulated industries such as financial services and insurance,” said Donagh Buckley, senior director of EMC Research Europe.
“Many of these businesses depend on highly complex, monolithic systems to handle data. This makes them difficult to manage effectively and slow to respond to new developments in technology.
“The Boole Business Labs allows international businesses, industry bodies, regulators and government to come together to understand and develop solutions to the shared challenges and risks they face in the areas of data governance, risk management and cybersecurity,” said Mr Buckley.
The investment comes on the heels of a similar deal between EMC and Vodafone to invest €2m in an industrial internet of things R&D facility in Cork.
“UCC is delighted with EMC’s support for the Boole Business Labs initiative and we look forward to adding further industry partners that are interested in collaborating on shared business challenges,” said Professor Ciaran Murphy, head of the Cork University Business School.
“The labs bear the name of our most famous academic – George Boole – a professor who besides being the inventor of Boolean logic, which sits at the heart of all computer systems, made an enormous contribution to our understanding of risk through his pioneering work on probability.”
University College Cork image via Shutterstock
