The announcement that leading US online games and entertainment company, Big Fish Games, is to establish their European headquarters in City Gate Business Park at Mahon in Cork City, creating up to 100 positions has highlighted new analysis which underscores the huge impact that the Government’s fibre optic MANs (Metropolitan Area Networks) are having on foreign direct investment.
Conal Henry, CEO of e|net, who manage the state-owned MANs, commented, “There is no doubt that MAN-enabled towns are getting significant competitive advantage in terms of IDA job creation. The 27 MAN-enabled towns have increased their share of IDA inward investment from 24% in 2004 to over 70% in 2008. Simply put, these towns are now habitually getting the vast majority of new FDI.”
Oliver Coughlan, director of business operations Ireland, Big Fish Games, said, “Ireland was chosen as our European headquarters based on the availability of a highly skilled, educated and multilingual workforce. Specifically, Cork offered a multicultural society with a burgeoning technology cluster and access to a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) that could guarantee our heavy bandwidth requirements at a highly competitive cost.”
Big Fish Games works with almost 500 games developers worldwide and distributes over 1.5 million casual games per day online resulting in massive bandwidth requirements. In addition, its two headquarters share customer platforms, databases and business applications.