IT pulling out?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

hp were in trouble a few years ago but have re invented themselves. they have invested too much money into ireland to pull out anytime soon. dell are learning that having tech support in india is not a good option, something that all the other companies will learn pretty soon.

as regards dell in limierick, the factory employess 4000 people approx, with 1200 of those non irish, alot of these are polish who may move to poland when that factory opens in august. i dont think that dell are leaving ireland anytime soon, scaled down yes, but leaving no. in fact, they are bringing alot of their tech support and services back to ireland from other countries.

youcancallme>al wrote:

Its actually at a stage now where some companies advertise their IT support as being England based or something similar just because they know how much people get frustrated trying to explain something they don't really understand themselves to another person that doesn't even understand them as it is

Yep Business customers dont just buy the hardware they buy a service . Aftersales/presales support is very important to them. Its comes to a stage were IT companies are losing business because of poor aftersales support.

Snickers Man wrote:

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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.

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i wouldnt bet on that, this is BOI were talkin about, you can bet they'll do an an post and let the lot of em go ala SDS . if memory serves BOI went to alot of trouble to get rid of their IT dept to begin with so it'd be much easier for em to hire a buch of newbies on a starter rate than have to match the wage those guys would be on. perpetual turnover is a classic tactic by the banks to keep costs down. seen it happen for years, im the only guy in my section on the maximum payscale level , as everyone else leaves in frustration after 2 to 3 years without getting half what im on doing the same job.