Irish firms are using in excess of 1,000 different cloud applications on the Azure platform, Microsoft’s country manager Paul Rellis told Siliconrepublic. He said this makes Ireland No 1 in cloud apps adoption worldwide.
Rellis said the apps are being used and tested across the gamut of the Irish economic landscape, from SMEs right up to public sector bodies.
“We are now No 1 in terms of apps adoption,” he explained.
Rellis said that so far some 10,000 seats of Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) have been bought by Irish-based organisations.
This is in addition to the fact that more than 400 established Irish software companies are developing software on Microsoft’s Azure platform, it’s ‘Windows for the Cloud’, which will be hosted at the US$500m data centre Microsoft opened in Dublin last autumn.
Rellis says Irish companies aren’t laggards in cloud computing but are actually leaders. “Ireland is leading the world in cloud adoption and right now up to 1,000 software apps are being used and tested by Irish firms.
“We see an enormous latent appetite and expect adoption of cloud computing by Irish owner managers and corporations in the next two to three years to grow rapidly.”
The ease with which cloud computing can be deployed is breathtaking. “If five companies wanted to collaborate on a new product, for example, before you’d set up an extranet and it would take months.
“Now you just sign up to BPOS for €5 a person a month and you are up and running in 25 minutes,” Rellis said.
“The appetite for cloud applications is phenomenal. Public sector departments are testing them and people are working to get their heads around the privacy and security aspects.”
