VMware 'not in Ireland for tax reasons'

From the old barracks in Ballincollig VMware is plotting to become one of the world’s largest companies by annexing a large portion of the $50bn (€38.8bn) cloud and virtualisation markets in the near future.

VMware’s chief financial officer, Jonathan Chadwick, was in Cork yesterday where he insisted that the firm was not in Ireland for tax reasons.

“We don’t run our business based on tax, we run our business based on the opportunity that is out there, from an overall market perspective.

“In the case of VMware, employing 630 people, putting operations in the right place is the most important thing. You want to make sure you have the right people, in the right place, at the right time, enabled by the right technology. If there happens to be a favourable business climate as well, that’s going to make things very attractive,” he said.

There has been suspicion behind the motivations of multinational companies locating operations here since it emerged that Apple has had untaxed billions flowing through Irish accounts. However, Mr Chadwick said that the Irish workforce were the most attractive component of the mix that Ireland offered.

“I always think it starts and stops with people, Ireland provides an incredibly literate workforce, not just because they speak English because obviously they are increasingly multilingual. It is one of the most business friendly locations. We find the Irish authorities understand the needs, particularly of high-tech business but more than that business in general,” he said.

The firm has expanded rapidly and is a global leader in the virtualisation field, which relates to the management of data centres. VMware is now targeting the growing cloud sector by launching a hybrid cloud offering that will enable companies to increase and decrease the amount of computing power that they need to run their operations seamlessly.

“It’s a really interesting shift and entry by us into the cloud market that is going to enable enterprise customers to take their internal cloud and data centres and provide that same footprint and capability outside their firewalls. The way our software is working is going to allow us to dynamically supply cloud-like capabilities on premises from their own data centres and also hosted by us,” said Mr Chadwick.