India Broadband Forum

Guest

Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Micheál Martin TD announced today that Cisco, the worldwide leader in networking, is to establish a dedicated world-class Research & Development Centre in Galway, with the support of IDA Ireland. The investment will be undertaken by Cisco subsidiary Cisco Internetworking (Ireland) Limited. Cisco develops and sells networking and communication technology products and services for transporting data, voice and video to customers worldwide.

The Galway centre will be an integral part of Cisco’s future worldwide Research & Development activities. It will initially employ 50 skilled graduates and is projected to grow to 200 positions over the next three years for people at degree level and above, with a number of positions requiring Master and PhD qualifications.

The Galway centre represents an important addition to the global R&D function of Cisco’s Voice Technology Group and will be involved in the development of new applications and services for its Unified Communications solutions. Cisco’s vision of Unified Communications is to help reduce communication chaos that disrupts business processes and slows decision making by using the intelligence in the network to connect to the right person the first time, using the most available, accessible communication medium.

Minister Martin said “This investment is a superb win for Ireland coming as it does from a truly global household name of the calibre of Cisco and involving R&D that will further push-out the frontiers of global communications through the development of next-generation products and services. It is a further significant increase in the benchmark by which other global companies can judge Ireland’s abilities to successfully support truly cutting-edge highly sophisticated technological R&D and of our ability to provide the required numbers of the most knowledgeable and skilled graduates that can be found anywhere in the world.”