50+ years for HPE in Ireland

Hewlett Packard Enterprise, better known as HPE, is an American multinational enterprise technology company. Formed in 2015 after the splitting of the original Hewlett-Packard company into two distinct parts, HPE focuses on the business market, providing servers, storage, networking, and digital transformation. 

HPE heritage in Ireland

Like many technology companies operating in Ireland, HPE owes its longstanding presence to acquisitions. Digital Equipment Corporation established operations in Galway more than 50 years ago, in 1971, originally attracted by low costs and access to an educated workforce through nearby colleges. Five years later, it set up its own facility at Leixlip in county Kildare. Digital would later come into the HP fold through the latter’s acquisition of Compaq in 2001. 

By that time, Hewlett-Packard had established itself as the largest IT employer in Ireland, employing more than 4,000 people across operations in Kildare, Galway, Dublin and Belfast. Following the restructuring, HP closed its global print business in Leixlip in 2017, with the loss of around 500 jobs. 

HPE’s Irish operation is strategically significant to the parent company; Ireland remains a major location for the company in the EMEA region, while it can count on support and strong relationship with IDA Ireland and the Irish Government. Ireland hosts HPE Financial Services’ EMEA hub in Ireland, and its Aruba networking subsidiary has a global operations team in Cork. 

HPE continues to grow across Ireland. In 2021, it announced the addition of 150 new jobs over a two-year period across its Galway and Kildare sites. In the same year, HPE’s Galway site was designated as a Centre of Excellence within the group for cybersecurity globally. At the time, the Galway site already had the largest footprint of cyber professionals within HPE globally and its expansion included new roles for data scientists and incident response practitioners. Ireland is also a R&D hub for the company’s fast-growing GreenLake portfolio. 

How Ireland Helps HPE

• 50+ years for HPE in Ireland 
• Company operates from three sites in Ireland
• In 2021, Galway site was designated a cybersecurity centre of excellence
• Continued planned expansion of Irish operations