Martin Murphy, managing director, HP Ireland
3rd February 2010
A vision for the future of Brand Ireland.
In the past year, Brand Ireland has been affected badly by the events that have happened globally and locally. Also, during the boom years what we didn’t do was invest in a sustainable Brand Ireland, we worked with the Celtic Tiger because that suited us at the time. Where we are now is we need to invest in a new brand identity. I would see it as a new national identity for Ireland as a 21st century economy and we undertake that as a matter of urgency.
Our vision is that Ireland would be perceived internationally and recognised internationally as a global hub for knowledge, information and know-how. That expertise and competency should be supported by graduates coming out of schools and universities who could feed into that vision and actually provide jobs, and that’s supported by the infrastructure and competitiveness to drive it with a can-do attitude from Government executing on that vision.
The Government’s Smart Economy document is a starting point and sets out a framework for the type of knowledge economy we would like to achieve. The challenge is that document is a framework – we need to prioritise aspects of it and get it into execution, we need to set targets for achieving goals and how we should achieve those goals.We need to set targets to deliver against.
Martin Murphy's biography
Martin Murphy is managing director for Hewlett Packard (HP) Ireland and is responsible for driving HP’s business growth in the Irish market. In recent years, HP Ireland has achieved record growth and is now the largest IT and services provider in Ireland.
In June 2000, Murphy was appointed managing director of HP Ireland, having joined the company’s consulting organisation in 1986. In 1995, he was made sales director of the company in Ireland and presided over year-on-year double digit growth across all product lines North and South.
Since then, he has successfully steered the Irish operation through the Compaq merger, one of the largest in the history of the State, as well as other global acquisitions locally, including Electronic Data Systems, Mercury Interactive Corporation, Synstar and Schlumberger Business Continuity Services.
More recently, Murphy has been setting out the stall for HP as a key driver for innovation and job creation in the Irish economy.
In March 2009, HP created 500 new jobs in Leixlip as part of an €18-million investment in a multi-lingual support centre, followed in November with a further 50 jobs being created at HP’s Galway software development centre, which has been designated as a Centre of Expertise for Cloud Computing Services.
Murphy also sits on the board of the UCD Smurfit School and the Institute of Directors.
