Business software player Sage is investing €400,000 to double the size of its Dublin data hosting centre.
The news was announced at the opening of the company’s new localisation centre in CityWest, which will support the company’s aggressive push into the global customer relationship management (CRM) market.
The new localisation centre will employ 40 people, over 80pc of whom will be third-level graduates in the disciplines of software, engineering, localisation and IT network.
The expanded data centre will also function as a disaster recovery site for Sage worldwide, hosting mission-critical IT infrastructure for the company’s US and European subsidiaries.
The data centre will also host new and future Sage software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications such as Sage CRM, Coretime and Line 50.
The move comes on the back of a decision last year to invest €3m in the localisation centre, which paved the way for the creation of the 40 jobs.
“This is a very important strategic move by Sage,” explained Sage Ireland managing director Liam Mullaney. “The first tranche of the data centre, phase one, was about putting in place the technical infrastructure to have a backup for our headquarters in Atlanta. It would act as a failover to Dublin in the event of disaster.
“Phase two is for applications outside the US for SageCRM.com hosted software, CoreTime, Line 50 and I’m sure that throughout Europe and the US Sage businesses will want to use Dublin as the hosting centre for their applications.”
Mullaney said that another major influence on Sage’s decision to deploy localisation in Dublin was the availability of people with the key skills and the advanced technical knowledge that we require.
“Localisation is about more than just languages. Across all of our primary products – Act, SageCRM and SalesLogix – we need to have the products localised for many of the coutnires we operate in. It is not just about translating but getting the user interface right as well as regulatory and compliance matters, for instance ensuring the products can handle the different tax rates and Vat rates.
“We announced last year that we were planning up to 40 new jobs. Eleven of those jobs are in place today and we are well on way to growing the business here even further.”
By John Kennedy
