EMC country manager Chris Roche is one of the people currently trying to talk the Government into moving towards developing a cloud computing strategy and in the coming days he is due to head towards Dáil Éireann to speak with Government officials including An Taoiseach, Brian Cowen about the possibility of an accelerated approach to the idea.

Chris Roche, EMC

EMC itself is billed as a company that can provide “the systems, software, and services to leverage one of your most strategic assets – your business data”. With that in mind we also talked to Roche about whether Irish companies – and our Government – are willing to spend the cash to ensure they have the right systems to protect their data and whether or not the Irish workforce lives up to that oft-used ‘smart economy’ tag.

KomplettBlog.ie: You became country manager at EMC last year, moving in from the company’s UK offices, what brought you to Ireland initially?
Chris Roche: It was a new role that I was taking on as country manager here, I ran consultancy for EMC prior to that and for me I saw it as a great career opportunity but also I think there’s a great future for what we do in Ireland. Even though at the time of me coming over here a lot of people would argue that I was heading over in one of the deepest recessions ever. I actually think there’s a great potential in Ireland and the Irish market.

Are Irish companies spending much in terms of your type of consultancy – systems, services and software – or are they still in survival mode in terms of what they’re spending?
Well, I ran consultancy in the UK and Ireland previously and 2009 was our most successful year for those consultancy services. To be honest, people will always invest in consultancy you’re focused on execution. What I mean by that is that you will have a number of organisations who have a consultancy business and they will come in and deliver you the documents that say ‘this is what you need to do’ but won’t have the capabilities behind that to actually execute on that for you. Then they say ‘well you have to do that yourself’.
Then others focus on just the implementation stage. However, unless you actually get involved in the execution phase, actually changing things – be that hardware, software, even the people, the processes whichever level you’re working at – unless you execute the change you’re not adding any value to the client.

"Is there an appetite from the Irish government to move to some sort of cloud based technology? I think the answer is yes," says Roche.

Overall though, no one’s throwing money around, it’s about streamlining more than anything?
Absolutely, in the first instance, if you’re up against survival, up to 80% of costs are keeping yourself running, rather than new processes, applications, projects that you’re involved in. For anything that means a client can rapidly take those costs out and help reinvest into something that will help you grow your business, or even in the short term to help with cash flow, clients are willing to invest in that right now.

Moving on to the Government, there has been noises from both the UK and US governments that they are moving towards cloud computing strategies in order to save money, there is however little evidence in print of Ireland heading that way – have you seen any willingness from Government level to move towards the cloud?
Is there an appetite from the Irish government to move to some sort of cloud based technology? I think the answer is yes anyway, and if you if read the McCarthy Report, the move to a shared service approach across Government and the transformation of transforming the public services in this respect is seen as a good idea. There are a number of reports in this area from people such as the OECD that state technology is a fundamental building block for them, the Government is information rich and the right information infrastructure is absolutely key.

Hold your horses, the Government hasn’t jumped on the cloud bandwagon just yet, but it looks like they want to, according to Roche.

Have you met with anyone personally in the Government on this though so far?
I met and spoke with An Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, himself last September and he said to me ‘we can and we will overcome the economic crisis, we can and we will move forward by taking innovations from companies such as EMC’. I believe that he is acutely aware of the benefits that can he had from moving all the things that a cloud based technology…

But what about an actual cohesive strategy to move towards using the cloud, as they have (or appear to have) in the UK?
Well I’m speaking with the Government next week about it. Together with our partner, VMWare (Ed: who EMC own a majority share of) launched a program how to accelerate towards a private cloud and I think there will be interest in ideas like that. From our angle, literally we are at this moment working on making a proposition to the Irish Government around how we can make significant moves – if they do take a wholesale, more accelerated approach – move towards the cloud. Their advisors and technologists are discussing this on a daily basis with us and we’re saying if you take an accelerated approach now is the time to do it you will achieve significant benefit.

Can you put a monetary value on that? The UK estimates put their possible savings from moving to the cloud at £3.2 billion.
In short, nope. You can’t put numbers on it, well I can’t in print anyway. However, it’s number one on my agenda anyway, to bring the private cloud – and when I talk about private cloud I mean a secure private cloud. One of my agendas with EMC and one of the reasons I came to Ireland is absolutely accelerating that into Government and that’s why we’re trying to encourage them in that direction and I see an openness to do it. I don’t think there’s any negativity about it at all put it that way.

EMC – between bases in Cork and Dublin – has made a lot of investment in building a solid base in Ireland. From that angle, the company obviously believes the talent is there in the Irish workforce, that there’s a bit of substance behind the ‘smart economy’ idea.
Well speaking for us, we have roughly about 1,600 employees in Ireland. We invest about €350 million in business here each year. A large, large portion of staff are PhD educated and 80% are third level educated. We hugely encourage recruiting Irish citizens. We do have a vast number of foreign nationals as well and indeed anyone who can speak several languages as we have a shared service in Cork that supports Europe so clearly we’ve got people who can speak various languages.
The vast majority of our employees are Irish based and from Cork in particular though… The thing that keeps us here is the quality of staff that we get to see here in Ireland and the other thing that helps us is the flexibility of those staff, they can adapt. The guys down in Cork their ability to adapt to changing conditions over 30 years has been great and the level of education is absolutely key here so from our angle. I am absolutely hopeful for us and for Ireland because we are a smart economy, we can leverage that for the next three to five years as we come out of recession.

Finally, going back to any upcoming meeting with the Government, you’re obviously hopeful they’ll move forward towards the private cloud you’re talking about?
If look back on to May, when I took on the position of country manager, and there was still a Budget to get through, there was NAMA to get through and regardless of your political persuasion there was a mess that had to be gotten through. Those boxes have been ticked and the focus is now on Greece and others, indeed when we go abroad there’s a perception that things are being done in Ireland, they’re looking at what we’re doing and then hopefully the cloud is the next step.