Ireland has a wide base of indigenous telecommunications equipment makers and telecommunications software vendors that have built up a strong international market presence over more than two decades. Its growth has been enabled by the long-standing presence in Ireland of a substantial base of overseas companies engaged in equipment manufacturing and software development.
Another major factor in the growth of the sector was the wave of deregulation in the telecommunications industry throughout the 1990s. This opened up opportunities for new entrants to target emerging operators and new technological niches. A particularly strong telecommunications software cluster developed in Dublin, fuelled by considerable levels of venture capital investment in start-up and growth stage firms from the mid-1990s. Cork, Limerick/Shannon and Galway also fostered significant levels of telecommunications software development activity, in both multinational and indigenous companies, in areas such as call centre servers, network management, service assurance and rating.
Ireland is now recognised as an international telecommunications software hub, particularly in the wireless space. Irish firms that are targeting the telecommunications market have a global focus, with considerable levels of sales and business development activity throughout the US, Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia-Pacific markets. In the latter region, Irish firms have won significant deals in Japan, China, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Sri Lanka. South Korea’s burgeoning broadband wireless market is now an important focus for several Irish firms. In the US and in EMEA, Irish companies have won substantial deals with both tier-one fixed and wireless operators, with smaller, regional players and with cable operators.
A number of Irish firms working in emerging technological niches have secured some of the biggest deals that have been signed to date within their respective market segments. Examples include major deployments of convergent mediation software in the US and a worldwide rollout of mobile commerce software in a tier-one 3G operator. Other firms have achieved notable successes with operators, media firms and large enterprise customers in areas such as wireless portals, wireless messaging and rating.
Underpinning this success is a large pool of software engineering talent with considerable experience and expertise in key telecommunications and IT standards, such as IP, OSI, SS7, GPRS, 3G, WAP, XML, IN standards, SMS, MMS, TMN, ISDN and Bluetooth. Individual firms have developed strategies around emerging niche standards, such as the mobile data SyncML standard, the VoiceXML mark-up language and the digital radio standard Tetra. One group of serial entrepreneurs achieved notable trade-sale exits in successive projects by gaining early mover advantage in SMS and WAP.
On the equipment side, Ireland has strongly performing companies operating in product categories such as audio conferencing, data conferencing and web conferencing; IP-based handset manufacture; private key systems; converged small-office voice and data networking systems; and PC-based call centre servers. These firms have built up strong linkages in the international telecommunications market, selling their products via OEM relationships with some of the world’s largest operators and through a wide network of sales and distribution partners.
A second tier of companies, with either a horizontal technological focus or an enterprise applications background, has also achieved significant levels of sales into the telecommunications market. Examples include sales to large operators of distributed systems software based on the Corba middleware standard; web services software; customer relationship management software; and performance management software.
Ireland has also built up a strong research capability in telecommunications, and a number of campus companies have already emerged from research groups based in the universities, focussed on areas such as personalisation for mobile networks and digital video processing for mobile networks. The government’s major commitment to investment in research and development (R&D) in information and communications technologies will ensure that a steady flow of start-up projects will follow.