University College Cork and US IT multinational EMC have partnered to develop and launch what they claim is Europe’s first industry-led research centre.

Based in UCC, the Boole Business Labs aims to enable regulated businesses in industries such as financial services, biopharma, health services, telecoms and ICT balance innovation with industry regulation compliance.

The centre, which officially opens today, will focus on IT business systems integrity, risk analysis, including cybersecurity, and innovation in regulated industries. It will be run by a team of researchers at UCC.

EMC Corporation provides cloud computing and big data solutions to various industry sectors and employs over 3,000 people in Ireland. The firm has three offices in Cork and a sales office in Dublin.

Speaking about the Boole Labs collaboration, Donagh Buckley, senior director of EMC Research Europe and CTO of EMC Ireland Centre of Excellence, said: “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.”

In Association with

Professor Ciaran Murphy, head of Cork University Business School (CUBS), added: “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.”