By Business & Finance 
Pictured: Dell EMC Ireland VP and General Manager Aisling Keegan
Ireland is a key strategic location for many of Dell’s worldwide and EMEA operations.
Ireland is a key strategic location for many of Dell EMC’s worldwide and EMEA operations, headed up by EMEA President Aongus Hegarty. Dell EMC is one of the largest employers in Ireland with a headcount of over 5,000 split between hubs in Dublin, Cork and Limerick. Despite Ireland’s relatively small size, Dell EMC’s operations here boast one of the largest footprints across EMEA and Dell EMC’s Innovation Centre in Ireland is one of the largest customer centres of its kind in the country.
Regional stories
The Dublin campus provides multilingual, high complexity data centre enterprise support services across the Middle East and Africa, is a hub for sales organisations, marketing, talent and diversity management and is also the European HQ for Dell Financial Services.
The historic EMC Cork facility has become a multi-functional campus since its establishment in 1988 and in 2009 became a Center of Excellence (CoE) incorporating research and training. It is the largest manufacturing site of historic EMC outside of the US and has emerged as a leader in the initiative to develop and manufacture energy efficient information infrastructure technologies. The campus also hosts Dell EMC’s International Executive Briefing Centre, Global Solutions Centre, Worldwide Customer Service Centre, VMware Support Services, Software Development and Shared Services functions.
Meanwhile in Limerick the exciting story is the IoT lab, one of the company’s three across the globe. Having commenced operations in Limerick in 1991, Dell Limerick has undergone a significant transformation over the years, evolving into a multifunctional centre of excellence for IT research and development, software and solutions development, services operations, supply chain operations and finance. The team delivers support operations for a wide range of the company’s business areas in EMEA and globally, as well as driving customer solutions, software and IT development. Industry-leading skills are deployed in technology design and change management, which is enabled through certified programme and project management, and the campus has deep bench strength in operations management. The Dell EMC EMEA Internet of Things lab is based in Limerick, while the historic Dell EMEA Solutions Centres are led from Limerick.
The IoT lab is the destination for customers from across EMEA to visit to work with partners on proof of concepts for new IoT projects. Dell EMC partners with the Irish software research group Lero at the University of Limerick and also sponsor post-doctoral research on the use of IoT in smart sustainable cities, with a focus on Limerick.
Pictured: Aongus Hegarty, EMEA President and Aisling Keegan, VP and General Manager (Ireland) of Dell EMC.
Forefront of digital transformation
Dell EMC is at the forefront of the current digital transformation narrative. As Dell EMC Ireland vice-president and general manager Aisling Keegan, said in a recent interview “Consumer and customer demand is fueling a need for businesses and for tech companies to be able to respond and remove all that latency that we have had historically.”
Before the merger of Dell and EMC in 2016, acquisitions were instrumental in building a portfolio strong on IP, with Dell acquiring 22 companies over the past 15 years to address challenges identified in the marketplace; meanwhile EMC was acquiring strategically aligned partners like VMware and Pivotal.
In global news, Dell Technologies announced this week that they are considering a number of options, potentially an IPO for Dell or emerging as a public company through a reverse merger with VMware, the $50 billion cloud computing company it already controls.
When Dell acquired EMC for $67 billion, in 2015, that gave Dell 80 percent of VMware. VMware was an early pioneer in virtualisation technology, which provided companies a more efficient way to run data centres by effectively packing multiple virtual computers in a single piece of hardware.
Dell EMC now offers a suite of business products and services which includes data storage, servers, converged infrastructure, data protection, security, and networking as well as desktop and laptop products.
Speaking to Business & Finance recently, Catherine Doyle, Enterprise Sales Director, Dell EMC Ireland, said, “Working with our customers we have an opportunity to shape their digital transformation journey from the edge to cloud to core. This is what really excites me. Business has changed so much in recent years that digital is really driving every industry.”
This article was updated on 6th February, 2018 to reflect updated information.
