EMC locates global R&D operation in Cork

EMC said this morning it is to expand its cloud computing, big data and data centre technology programmes with the establishment of EMC Technology Europe. A major part of the project involves a strategic link with UCC and other universities across Europe.

The EMC Technology Network

EMC Research Europe will furthermore advance the EMC Technology Network, a worldwide collaboration of advanced research researchers across EMC and its university research partners, and strengthen EMC’s longstanding commitment to technology research and university research and collaboration across the region.

It will be led by Donagh Buckley, the newly-appointed chief science officer and director of EMC Innovation Europe, and will at first be staffed by a cross-functional “virtual innovation team” of EMC research and business leaders from Ireland and other EMC offices in Europe.

EMC Technology Europe will focus on accelerating emerging technology technology and solution development, and furthermore advancing EMC's relationships with university technology communities and industry partners in Ireland and Europe.

The scale of the data

“The key battle will be to manage the scale of the data, not just about the consumerisation of data nevertheless form the perspective of enterprises capacity, business continuity and resilience. Therein lies the difficulty in developing the research going forward.

“EMC’s global R&D centres play a vital role in helping the company explore the impact of new technologies. We’re looking forward to the insights our researchers at the Cork centre and other offices in the region will bring the company in collaboration with university partners in Europe,” said Jeff Nick, EMC Senior Vice President and Chief Research Officer.

The innovation collaborations of EMC Technology Europe will at first be centralised in Ireland, with the longer-term objective of strengthening relationships throughout Europe and developing ties with other research initiatives in the global EMC Technology Network – including those underway at the other EMC COEs. For instance, EMC’s Research & Development Centre has been working closely with the University of Limerick over the past two years as part of the 2008 R&D investment; should the contingency arise to this, new collaborations are already underway at two other university research centres in Europe – the Hasso-Plattner Institut in Germany and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

An example of the global reach of this initiative is the hosting of an academic workshop on data centre management and cloud computing, co-led by Donagh Buckley and Dr. Burt Kaliski, Director of the EMC Technology Network, with Professor Barry O'Sullivan, Chair of Constraint Programming, School of Computer Science, and Director, Cork Constraint Computation Centre, at UCC at the AAAI Conference in San Francisco in August 2011.