IT pulling out?

MrSquishSquash

I heard a rumor off two different sources (one in telecommunicatons & the other an environmental consultant) that there are four large IT companies beginning to pull out of Ireland after the General Election? Anyone else hear anything on the matter?

jor el

What four IT companies are these then?

I've been hearing a lot about Dell in the recent months and I personally don't think they're going to be in Ireland for much longer. Could be a year, could be 5 years, that's the trouble with rumors. Limerick's economy will get a fair smack when they do go though.

digitally-yours

Well i havent heard about any companies leaving but yes the Trend is deninately on the leaving side

More leaving then comming in.

cost getting too high and Poor getting Poorer :mad:

All I head is eircom is going to be carved up but I don't really care for them too much.

Manufacturing has been neglected by the goverment though.

PeakOutput

apparently threes still 14,000 unfilled it jobs in this country so i wouldnt panic just yet..........


but i definitely think that the Dell type of company (high output low cost) will start moving out if they have not already left but i think more and more "specialised" companies will take their place. this is obviously just a guess but we have had such a good reputation for our it industry i think its just a matter of evolution for companies like dell (lets face it the majority of workers in dell would probably be customer service orientated not technology orientated) to move off where they get cheaper labour whereas "innovation" companies will move in to soak up the expertise.

im no expert and could be wrong but thats just the impression i get when i hear about google etc moving into ireland

skywalker

Well if its a rumour on the internet & its in bold I dont see how theres even a possibility this isnt true.

testicle

MrSquishSquash wrote:

I heard a rumor off two different sources (one in telecommunicatons & the other an environmental consultant) that there are four large IT companies beginning to pull out of Ireland after the General Election? Anyone else hear anything on the matter?

If it's in bold then it must be true...

Tom Dunne

testicle wrote:

If it's in bold then it must be true...

No, if it's on the internet it must be true

StephenC_IRL

HP - theyve stopped renewing large contracts and arent taking on new people, looks bad

rogue-entity

Personally with the piss poor telecommunications infrastructure in Ireland, and the costs of doing business with monopolies, I am surprised companies havnt left yet. I have heard stories of businesses who wont setup here because they cant even get a telephone line within a reasonable period.. but thats really a discussion for the IOFL forum.

On an asside, the government has neglected to promote our own indiginous IT and software businesses instead, they are encouraging foreigners to come in. Sure, it may create jobs and bring money into the economy, but a lot of those companies just send the money back to their headquarters instead of keeping it in the economy.

If eircom gets carved up, well, that could be a good thing, if the wholesale and retail sectors are split up, and the industry properly regulated, it would be good for us all, but I cant see that happening, I have heard however, that eircom PhoneWatch, which apparently is nothing to do with eircom, is going to rebrand, becuase the brand association with eircom is killing their business, surprise surprise, and that from an epw employee too.

DublinWriter

StephenC_IRL wrote:

HP - theyve stopped renewing large contracts and arent taking on new people, looks bad

Interesting. A friend told me today that BOI were going to insource their IT back again. I wonder if it's connected?

biko

MrSquishSquash wrote:

four large IT companies beginning to pull out of Ireland

Companus interuptus

nc6000

What large contracts are HP not renewing?

Nehpets

Yore Ma's. That's a large one alright!

Stupid unstable industry

smartypants

DublinWriter wrote:

Interesting. A friend told me today that BOI were going to insource their IT back again. I wonder if it's connected?

thats interesting because it was a big project when it happened, how reliable is your source?

Vodafone are outsourcing their IT development to IBM, IBM have stated that will be moving some work (mainly coding) to India and have setup a department over there to handle the account.

brianthebard

Awesome, this'll make my arts degree a much more valuable commodity...

DublinWriter

smartypants wrote:

thats interesting because it was a big project when it happened, how reliable is your source?

Totally unreliable, he was drunk at lunchtime today when he slobbered it in my ear.

But then again, he told me about the whole Mike Soden affair months before it broke in the media, so who knows?

Nehpets

brianthebard wrote:

Awesome, this'll make my arts degree a much more valuable commodity...

How?

Maybe I should rethink what I want to do in college <_< >_>

stepbar

DublinWriter wrote:

Interesting. A friend told me today that BOI were going to insource their IT back again. I wonder if it's connected?

Its on the cards. HP are utterly crap. They should be shot for the way they have managed the BOI contract.

Jumpy

Any internal IT outsourcing is a bad idea. Users requesting and getting exactly what they want is an overall bad thing. Things will fall apart.

stepbar

Jumpy wrote:

Any internal IT outsourcing is a bad idea. Users requesting and getting exactly what they want is an overall bad thing. Things will fall apart.

Come again? Sounds like the first sentence contradicts the second line?

Doodee

well Galway already knows the ramafacations of having a large IT company closing.
I hope the other counties are as set for it though.

testicle

jor el wrote:

I've been hearing a lot about Dell in the recent months and I personally don't think they're going to be in Ireland for much longer. Could be a year, could be 5 years, that's the trouble with rumors. Limerick's economy will get a fair smack when they do go though.

Do you remember 1978?

Devon

Dell are still recruiting in Cherrywood for many tech support people, and they have over 100 vacancies advertised on their dell.ie site, so I don't imagine they'll be pulling out any time soon. Look what happened when they moved their home support over to India! Moving their server support over there would be a large nail in their coffin IMHO.

Snickers Man

This is hardly news. Many companies in the IT sector, especially in manufacturing, have been retrenching out of Ireland for years. Celestica, SCI, Gateway 2000, Seagate, Bourns, etc etc

As for HP: their manufacturing site here is highly automated and relatively new. There wouldn't be a huge cost saving relocating it elsewhere.

Also, much of what HP does in Ireland is service related. Many of the HP staff working on the BOI project are former BoI staff anyway. If HP gives up on that project and it gets taken back in house, then those people will probably become BoI employees again.

Dell are living on borrowed time here, at least on the manufacturing side. They are supposed to be opening a new plant in Poland some time soon (that's public domain knowledge) and when they do, they will probably ramp that up so that it is the main production site for Europe so that Limerick will gradually get phased out. It's got a few more years however.

Intel. Not going anywhere. Too expensive to build and equip those plants.

thebman

IBM manufacturer servers in Ireland in Mulhuddart.

Dell are still hiring for tech support because those are entry positions people are constantly leaving after a year or so.

galactus

I've heard a certain telecom is one of the companies

neGev

The thread title told me this would be about sex. How disappointing.

darkman2

Never mind Dell.

There is only one company in Ireland that could have this country in ruins if it leaves - Intel in Leixlip. The backbone of the economy in far less obvious ways then one might think.

easyontheeye

there has been many threads on this topic over on works & jobs.

would you say that in general IT professionals in Ireland have more to worry about than other industry professionals in terms of long term opportunities ?

patrickolee

StephenC_IRL wrote:

HP - theyve stopped renewing large contracts and arent taking on new people, looks bad

That's not true. I do some work here and there for HP and I can tell you they have just taken on a _lot_ of new people in the last few weeks (avoiding bold there!)

loopyloulou

patrickolee wrote:

That's not true. I do some work here and there for HP and I can tell you they have just taken on a _lot_ of new people in the last few weeks (avoiding bold there!)

But they wouldnt be permanent staff. Plenty of contractors being taken on alright, theyre doing their utmost to get rid of head counts, in the services department anyway. Nobody feels secure in here anymore, more or less everyone is just waiting for the next round of redundancies or outsourcing announcment.

DublinWriter

easyontheeye wrote:

would you say that in general IT professionals in Ireland have more to worry about than other industry professionals in terms of long term opportunities ?

Yes and no. There will always be companies in Ireland and companies will always need I.T.

However, non-I.T. companies have less and less I.T. people nowadays than say 10-15 years ago. Up to the 90's it was common for the average sized Irish company to have a fairly comprehensive I.T. staff including at least a programmer, systems analyst and operators.

These days, most companies will use off the shelf packages and local I.T. Service Providers for networking, etc.

There will always be low-level I.T. jobs around. Most of the more senior and interesting I.T. work will be done by the big I.T. multinationals and it's dubious whether they will still be here in Ireland in 10 years time.

MrSquishSquash

Dell was the only name i heard of the four, It would be a huge loss to the Irish economy & devastating to Limerick. It would deter other software & hardware firms/manufacturer's from setting up shop in Ireland!

stepbar

stepbar wrote:

Its on the cards. HP are utterly crap. They should be shot for the way they have managed the BOI contract.

agreed

raido9

MrSquishSquash wrote:

It would deter other software & hardware firms/manufacturer's from setting up shop in Ireland!

How so?

jhegarty

I heard that boards.ie was been outsouced to india.....

pwd

I know of two people who were hired in good IT roles in Dell in ireland recently and another who got a job in sales.
There is a new department in Limerick also (not manufacturing).
eircom is cutting its workforce by 10% over the next few years - but that will be across all operations and probably focusing on field staff (bizarrely enough considering they didn't have enough of them when there was a lot of storm damage recently).
They have however talked about restructuring the IT department. If that is not a euphemism for chopping it up then it could be a good thing for the IT department - the company is so vertically segmented at the moment that they might as well be outsourcing as having an internal department.

seamus

I.T. Companies will only move services out of Ireland that can be done cheaper elsewhere. Companies outsource support to the likes of India because it can be done remotely with no customers interaction.
Although as we all know, the tide is turning on that, and companies with non-European support are suffering bad rep from annoyed customers.

Ireland will still do very well with manufacturing, particularly highly skilled stuff such as processor manufacture that Intel does.

We occupy a nice piece of land which means that it's easy to ship stuff both to America and Europe. For many items, I would imagine that it's much cheaper (and/or faster) to build here and ship to Europe, than to build in Malaysia or India, and ship to Europe.
Freight costs, particularly for items that need to be transported by air, are still increasing. A company could send a shipment via air from India to London (for example), and it would arrive in a few hours. But for a fraction of the price (and only a marginal increase in time) they could drive it to London from Dublin.

pwd

I know someone who went for an interview with bank of ireland for a qa role - don't know if that would indicate they are probably internalising It or not.

MrSquishSquash

raido9 wrote:

How so?

There are a large number of third party software firms dependent on Dell in Limerick & Intel in Leixlip. They provide vital services to these corporations be it as contractors, specialist consultants or support roles. If you lose these large names then the smaller feeder companies go with it. We also attract a lot of R&D partly due to the presence of these companies, this would also see a decline as a result of their departure. As i said though it was only a rumor and someone may have gotten their wires crossed - well hopefully!

Tom Dunne

MrSquishSquash wrote:

There are a large number of third party software firms dependent on Dell in Limerick & Intel in Leixlip. They provide vital services to these corporations be it as contractors, specialist consultants or support roles.

As a former employee of Intel (IT dept.), I would love to hear you elaborate on what third party software firms depend on Intel, considering Intel does the vast majority of it's own software development.

Cormic

MrSquishSquash wrote:

There are a large number of third party software firms dependent on Dell in Limerick & Intel in Leixlip. They provide vital services to these corporations be it as contractors, specialist consultants or support roles. If you lose these large names then the smaller feeder companies go with it. We also attract a lot of R&D partly due to the presence of these companies, this would also see a decline as a result of their departure. As i said though it was only a rumor and someone may have gotten their wires crossed - well hopefully!

I would not agree with you about there being many external software support but there are a lot of third party companies that do shipping and the like. I think I read somewhere that 20% of all jobs in Limerick were reliant on Dell. Don't know if it is true but it would be scary if it was.

Calhoun

Cormic wrote:

I would not agree with you about there being many external software support but there are a lot of third party companies that do shipping and the like. I think I read somewhere that 20% of all jobs in Limerick were reliant on Dell. Don't know if it is true but it would be scary if it was.

from what i hear Dell wont be pulling out of Ireland any time soon. Cherrywood is mostly made up of business / corporate sales and tech support which they cant really move easily because although the labour is cheaper most companies arent just buying a product they are buying the service. If they receive ****e service because they are sent to an outsourced tech support / sales in a foreign country they will just change supplier and lets face it Dell openly admits most of its profits are from business users so this is something they dont want to mess up.

As far as the new plant in Poland goes i hear this is being setup to support eastern europe and the middle east. The limerick factory will still support europe/ scandanavia.

Snickers Man

Darkener wrote:

As far as the new Dellplant in Poland goes i hear this is being setup to support eastern europe and the middle east. The limerick factory will still support europe/ scandanavia.

That's true. And that will certainly be the case for the first few years. But will they require two plants in Europe as they both ramp up? I suspect not, in the long term.

Agree that this doesn't really effect the people in Cherrywood.

StephenC_IRL

DublinWriter wrote:

Interesting. A friend told me today that BOI were going to insource their IT back again. I wonder if it's connected?

thats one of the contracts..

Black Swan

The overseas IT corps need an entry point into the EU. An EU manufacturing/programming/whatever site has advantages over being outside the 25 nation group (free flow of trade, goods, etc.). If they leave Ireland, what other nation of the 25 will they move to?

thebaz

IT jobs have being moving to China, India and Eastern Europe for 4 or 5 year now -- for a few years now it looked like the gravy train was up for Irish IT staff -- i think people who are naturally talented at maths and computers will always get work in IT , but for the less gifted they should get work in other industries . What pisses me of is the software industry saying we need lots more graduates in IT , thats rubbish , as jobs will continue to go to Asia and Eastern Europe -- only do IT if you are generally interested and have talent at it.

Calhoun

Snickers Man wrote:

That's true. And that will certainly be the case for the first few years. But will they require two plants in Europe as they both ramp up? I suspect not, in the long term.

Agree that this doesn't really effect the people in Cherrywood.

it really depends Dell sells on the logistic time also so im assuming this will factor in somewhere, also the polish plant would have to cover the Eastern Europe/middle east / South Africa and Russia ect.

Who knows though, with the cost of doing business in Ireland its really not feasible to stay unless something changes.

stepbar

StephenC_IRL wrote:

thats one of the contracts..

A fairly big one TBH

feylya

HP has lost 3 or 4 fairly large contracts from the Clonskeagh building in the last 6 months. That said, the building is completely full of support staff. There isn't an empty seat in the building.