Vodafone Pumps £5m Into Irish Data Centre Services

Vodafone Ireland is expanding its data centre services in the country as part of a €7 million (£5.1m) investment designed to improve its cloud business in Europe.

The upgrade will cover all aspects of data centre, with Vodafone Ireland looking to boost its presence in managed hosting, private cloud, colocation, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings.

“We are very excited to expand our business division into cloud and hosting services for large companies and public sector clients,” said Anne Sheehan, enterprise director at Vodafone Ireland. The data centre services will be available to customers from the end of October 2015.

More complex

Vodafone Ireland head of enterprise product management Liam O’Brien told the Irish Times: “As companies look to transform themselves and become more agile and flexible, trying to manage traditional IT is becoming more complex and harder than expected.”

The investment will also create technical jobs at Vodafone Ireland, with a further 20 roles expected to be available on top of 120 new hires over the past 12 months.

“The world is changing quickly. Companies need to adapt and change quickly. They might do it themselves but it’s difficult when they’re not experts,” O’Brien is quoted as saying.

Vodafone said that the new services will complement the existing capabilities from Vodafone Cloud & Hosting services across a network of 18 data centres in the UK, Germany and South Africa.

Broadband expansion

Vodafone Ireland is also helping to build a £358 million state-assisted fibre to the premise (FTTP) network in the country with the Electricity Strategy Board (ESB), using existing electricity infrastructure. It will initially connect 500,000 premises not covered by these commercial deployments in 50 towns In Ireland, including Bray, Cork, Galway, Kilkenny, Limerick, Waterford and Wexford, by 2018.

Earlier this month, the company announced its home broadband service is now available to all of its existing UK mobile customers following a limited launch earlier this summer.

Vodafone Connect makes use of the company’s business cable network, which it acquired from Cable & Wireless in 2012, and the open-access BT Openreach network, giving it a fibre footprint of 22 million homes and businesses.

Residents in Manchester, Berkshire and parts of Hampshire and Surrey have had access to since June, with users in Essex, Hertfordshire and Yorkshire added over the past few weeks. All existing Vodafone customers will get £5 off all packages and will only pay half price for the first 12 months, excluding their line rental.

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