A joint collaboration between EMC and UCC, the Boole Business Labs is Europe's first industry-led research centre, which enables regulated businesses in industries such as financial services, biopharma, health services, telecoms and indeed ICT ensure they become innovative while remaining compliant with industry regulations when rolling out new technologies, like cloud and mobile.
The centre, officially opened by Minister Dara Murphy at an event in UCC today, will focus on IT business systems integrity, risk analysis, including cybersecurity, and innovation in regulated industries.
The Boole Business Labs is located in the O'Rahilly Building in the Cork University Business School (CUBS) at University College Cork and will be run by a team of researchers at UCC.
Commenting today, Donagh Buckley, Senior Director of EMC Research Europe and CTO of EMC Ireland Centre of Excellence, said:
“In today’s digital world, keeping pace with technological advancements and compliance standards poses serious challenges for highly regulated industries such as financial services and insurance.
“Many of these businesses depend on highly complex, monolithic systems to handle data. This makes them difficult to manage effectively and slow to respond to new developments in technology.
“The Boole Business Labs allows international businesses, industry bodies, regulators and government to come together to understand and develop solutions to the shared challenges and risks they face in the areas of data governance, risk management and cybersecurity,” said Mr Buckley.
A number of multinational and indigenous companies are already engaged and contributing to the Boole Business Labs project.
Professor Ciaran Murphy, Head of the Cork University Business School (CUBS), said:
“UCC is delighted with EMC’s support for the Boole Business Labs initiative and we look forward to adding further industry partners that are interested in collaborating on shared business challenges. The labs bear the name of our most famous academic – George Boole – a professor who besides being the inventor of Boolean logic, which sits at the heart of all computer systems, made an enormous contribution to our understanding of risk through his pioneering work on probability.”
Bob Savage, Vice President and Managing Director of EMC Centres of Excellence EMEA and head of EMC Ireland, said the Boole Business Labs is a “fantastic example of the power of collaboration between industry and academia.”
“Using the combined expertise of EMC and UCC, we have developed a multidisciplinary solution to the challenges of digital transformation for regulated industries. Leveraging the power of the EMC Federation, we can provide comprehensive tools for data storage, cloud development and cybersecurity.
“EMC and UCC’s collaboration further demonstrates the contribution of Cork and Ireland to innovation on a global stage.”
Dara Murphy, Minister for European Affairs and Data Protection, said: “In this fast-moving mobile-first and digital world, it is important that Irish indigenous, global- businesses and their employees, stay ahead of the curve and embrace new mobile, IoT and cloud technologies, to develop a competitive advantage in international markets.
“I would like to commend UCC's JB MacCarthy and EMC's Donagh Buckley for their foresight in developing Europe's first industry-led research centre in Cork. This unique collaboration between EMC and UCC, in sharing their innovation and cutting edge research in cloud, mobile, data analytics and regulatory compliance, is set to develop Cork status as a ‘go-to’ location for high-value businesses in the FinTech, health services, bio pharma, telecoms and ICT sectors, when communicating with their customers and commercialising new products through the cloud and mobile.”
