Vodafone Ireland is investing €7 million ($8 million) in the development of new data-centre services for enterprise and public sector customers, according to a report in the Irish Times.
The paper said the company -- a unit of the Vodafone Group -- plans to offer new services including co-location, managed hosting, private cloud and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) from October. The move will also create 20 new jobs, adding to the 120 new hires in the past 12 months.
The investment includes an increase in capacity at the operator's data centre in Ireland, which serves Vodafone Europe. The company also leases capacity in two other sites in the Dublin area. For security reasons, the company does not disclose the exact location of its data centre and refers to the Dublin facility as a dark site.
Vodafone Ireland enterprise director Anne Sheehan told the newspaper that €25 million has already been invested in the Dublin data centre.
"We put a further €7 million into it for enhanced capacity that we feel we need for the enterprise customers," she said. "There's no downside to this investment for us."
Liam O'Brien, head of enterprise product management at Vodafone Ireland, noted that the operator intends to meet the growing demand by enterprises for cloud and data centre services as they transform their operations to become more agile and flexible.
"The move towards cloud and data centre services enables companies to take that complexity in their own environment and give it to someone who is best placed to manage it in a more flexible and more agile way," O'Brien told the Irish Times.
Vodafone Global Enterprise, the managed communications division within the Vodafone group, says on its web site that it operates nine data centres in the UK and Ireland. On a global basis, the group operates data centres through its partners in 99 markets, across 38 countries and five continents.
For more:
- see this Irish Times article
- see this TechWeekEurope article
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