Google

“If the lights were to go out in California, Dublin would maintain Google worldwide.” Nelson Mattos, Vice-President of Engineering for Google EMEA.

The search engine Google was founded in 1998 by Stanford University PhD students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Google very quickly went on to become the top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program AdWords, which is the largest and fastest growing in the industry, provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users.
Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley, California with offices throughout North America, Europe, Asia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Turkey, Australia, Brazil, India, and the U.K.
 

In 2003, Google opened its EMEA Head Quarters in Dublin, initially employing 100 people. In 2005 and 2006, Google’s Ireland operation continued to grow and the company announced expansion projects creating over 1,100 new jobs and also expanding their premises in Dublin. The Irish operation is now Google’s largest outside of the US.

The investments allowed Google to meet the increasingly diverse needs of its growing number of customers – both users and advertisers - in over 35 countries across the EMEA region. Google’s original mandate included a European Data Centre, Multilingual Editing, Customer Support activities and Financial Shared Services. The Irish operation has grown more rapidly than anticipated and has expanded to incorporate the following business activities:

• A ‘site reliability’/engineering team supporting Google’s European hosting and search activities.
• Multilingual customer support and editing for Google’s AdWords advertising product.
• Online relevancy testing and product support.
• Financial and administrative shared services to support Google’s EMEA operations.

Google has a number of collaboration initiatives with Irish universities, which they are actively expanding. These cover areas such as recruiting, financial sponsorships, internships, tech talks with students and working with university faculties to develop seminars.

More recently, Google has begun expanding research activities in EMEA and are in the process of bringing in research awards for faculties in Europe including Ireland. 

The pool of talent from a diverse multinational base allowed Google build their EMEA Headquarters here. The talent, ambition and drive of the Irish workforce has allowed Google expand quickly and efficiently beyond their original plans. Other contributing factors to their success were:

• Favourable labour market
• Strong ICT and engineering professionals
• Capital investment relief
• Corporate tax rate
• Research opportunities and collaborations
• Access to innovative and progressive management
• Access to EMEA

Find further benefits of locating in Ireland in Why Ireland