An overview of the week in deals in the Irish technology sector.
HP to buy Irishman Mike Lynch’s company for US$10bn
One of the world’s biggest technology companies, HP, is to spend US$10bn to buy Autonomy, a software company started by Irishman Dr Mike Lynch with a stg£10,000 loan from his parents.
It is understood that the US$10bn acquisition will be HP’s largest to date.
Cambridge-based and London Stock Exchange-listed Autonomy develops infrastructure technology that has been adopted by enterprises to process information across all internal and external data sources and counts customers such as US federal government agencies, Cisco Systems, the US Library of Commerce, ABN Amro, Forbes, Johnson & Johnson and Banco de Espana.
Lero signs €300k contract with European Space Agency
The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre (Lero) has signed a research contract worth €300,000 with the European Space Agency to create a potential software framework for future space missions.
The 18-month programme will begin in September and will comprise researchers at the University of Limerick and Trinity College Dublin.
The group at Trinity College Dublin, led by Dr Andrew Butterfield, in collaboration with their Lero partners at the University of Limerick, are leading an effort to explore the feasibility of developing a software framework that would allow all the scientific experiment and flight control software to be safely isolated from one another, so that failure of one component cannot lead to the failure of others.
This software framework, the “Secure Separation Kernel” is itself an extremely critical component, and the research challenge is to explore the use of verification techniques based on formal logic to ensure its correctness, rather than relying solely on extensive testing techniques. The aim is develop a software development process that allows such kernel software to be certified to very high state-of-the-art certification standards, appropriate for space flight.
Irish software firms’ innovation brings SAP into Microsoft Office
SAP specialists Minola Technology has partnered with Spanish Point Technologies, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, to develop cutting-edge technology to save businesses time and money.
Until now, users of both the industry-leading SAP business system and Microsoft Office applications – including Outlook, Word and Excel – have generally spent a significant amount of time switching between these systems.
With LookupPoint, users can select a business item in any email, document or spread sheet and the associated information from SAP will be displayed instantly in the same screen without having to leave the Microsoft Office environment.
Three new wind farms planned for Ireland, totalling 13.6MW
Irish energy storage group Gaelectric is partnering with the Chinese wind turbine manufacturer XEMC Group to co-develop three new wind farms in Ireland, valued at €18m. The two companies have also signed a Letter of Intent to co-develop Gaelectric’s remaining wind energy projects in Ireland and the US.
XEMC Group is a manufacturer of direct drive permanent magnet generator (PMG) wind turbines. The deal with Gaelectric signals XEMC’s first commercial deployment of its wind turbines in Europe.
IDA Ireland has called the XEMC and Gaelectric partnership a significant development to help progress Chinese and Irish business co-operation.
XEMC’s XV90 turbines will be installed at three Gaelectric onshore sites: Roosky in Co Roscommon; Leabeg in Co Offaly; and Crowinstown in Westmeath. The combined wind power output of the three wind farms, once built, will be 13.6MW.
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