Gartner relaunches Irish operation


5 Mar 2003

Research and consultancy firm Gartner has opened a Dublin office as part of a strategy to relaunch and extend its service offering in the Irish market and has appointed Oisin Byrne, the former head of IBM Ireland’s software business, managing director.

Gartner already has a Cork office thanks to its purchase of a research firm, the National Institute of Management Technology, in 1995. Byrne said that while this business has a strong research pedigree, he wanted to extend its remit to include more value-added services.

“I want to position Gartner Ireland as a technical advisor to senior IT decision makers,” he told siliconrepublic.com. “I want to use our knowledge more proactively, for example, by making more analysts available to customers who have a technology decision to make but need the right information in order to do it.”

With this in mind, Gartner is to launch business consulting services focused on certain key areas, in addition to its existing market research offering. One of these would be strategic sourcing, where Gartner consultants would work with companies on sourcing projects, evaluating concepts such as business process outsourcing. Total cost of ownership (TCO) services will make up a second area of activity. Pioneered by Gartner analyst Bill Kirwan, the TCO concept has grown to become accepted as an essential measure of the true cost of technology deployed by organisations.

“We’d like people to understand what IT actually costs them and give them information they can use to build service level agreements on,” said Byrne.

Compared with other markets such as the UK, Ireland has a very underdeveloped research infrastructure. Apart from Gartner, International Data Corporation is the only other major international technology research organisation with a presence in the Irish market.

As well as six consultants in Cork, Gartner is recruiting an additional three for the Dublin office. The company has a total of 16 staff.

By Brian Skelly