Ireland’s fastest growing city and a two-hour drive from Dublin, Galway’s location places high growth businesses on track for European expansion.
Galway’s proximity to Dublin Airport, Shannon Airport and Ireland West Airport Knock ensure first-class connectivity to international markets, attracting global leaders including Boston Scientific, Lumension, ZeniMax Online Studios, Hewlett Packard (HP), Avaya, Cisco, SAP, EA and Fidelity to establish a presence in the ‘City of the Tribes’.
Pennsylvania-headquartered SEKO MedTec Solutions, an operating company of the global logistics industry leader Sutherland Global Logistics (SGL), announced plans this month to establish a European Control Centre in Galway, with the creation of 30 jobs.
A young, vibrant city with a combined student population of 23,000 from the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG) and Galway Mayo Institute of Technology, Galway offers a steady flow of talent.
Galway was recently named as fDi Intelligence’sTop Micro European City, in addition to claiming the second spot in both the Top 10 Micro European Cities for Economic Potential and the Top 10 Micro European Cities for FDI Strategy lists.
The city has cemented its position as an emerging FDI location attracting exciting tech companies within areas including gaming, medtech, data analytics and connected health.
Early stage, fast growing companies have also been enticed by the city’s reputation as an international centre of excellence for manufacturing and research in the medical and biomedical sectors.
After the recent opening ofNUI Galway’s €30 million Biomedical Science building, with nine of the world’s top 10 medtech companies on its doorstep, Galway is now one of five global hubs in the medtech sector, in a market worth €95 billion annually in the EU.
Medtronic, Inc. opened a Customer Innovation Centre in Galway in 2013, providing state-of-the-art facilities for physicians and Medtronic engineers to work together on developing new therapies.
Galway has built an international reputation in the field of data analytics and the semantic web, and thereby has attracted key players including Cisco, Fidelity and HP. The global market for business analytics is currently estimated to be worth in excess of $34 billion and the city will play a key role in supporting the sector’s future growth.
Launched in December 2013, Insight, the Centre for Data Analytics — a joint initiative between NUI Galway, UCC, DCU and UCD — brings together more than 200 researchers from higher education institutions to develop a new generation of data analytics technologies.
The city boasts successful home-grown businesses within the medtech and data analytics sectors including Altocloud, a SaaS-based customer care solution that leverages social media and big data analytics to change the game for customer interaction, and respiratory drug delivery company Aerogen.
Companies with a presence in Galway:
Employing 400 people, SAP’s Galway facility has a multilingual service and support centre for the SME and Multinational enterprise sectors, in addition to teams responsible for Support, Cloud Services, IT Support, Technical Writing, E-Learning, Translations, License Auditing and Partner Services, covering 29 languages.
Attracted to the highly skilled pool of available talent in the technology area, modern infrastructure and flexible business environment, Lumension established an R&D Centre in Galway in 2009, helping to build out the company’s powerful suite of endpoint security solutions.
Electronic Arts (EA) currently employs 450 people at its European Customer Experience Centre of Excellence in Galway, providing 24-hour, multilingual support for a range of games.
Cisco invested in a dedicated site for 250 research and development staff in Galway City in 2007. The Cisco Galway team has global architecture and engineering responsibility for collaboration software clients and services across Desktop, Web Browser, Virtualized Thin-Clients, Tablets and Smartphone.
Galway-headquartered NetFort provides software products to monitor activity on virtual and physical networks. Established in 2002, the company has built up a global customer base in the enterprise, education and government sectors, with customers including the US Navy, Honda Canada and the London School of Economics.
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