The Western Region of the Academy visited HPE on the 22nd September 2026 and held a regional meeting to plan for the year ahead.
Mark Gantly, Úna Parsons, Tom Leahy, Padraic O’Donoghue, Seán Finlay, Gráinne Farrell (HPE), Maurice Buckley, David Dumigan, Ger Hurley.
The Academy were welcomed by Gráinne Farrell, Director of Engineering and Site Lead at HPE, Galway who provided an overview of HP Enterprise.
HPE’s Galway site is primarily focussed on the development of HPE’s hybrid cloud platform, Greenlake. It also hosts commands centres for cybersecurity and physical security, and therefore plays a key role in protecting HPE’s assets around the world (including IT infrastructure, intellectual property, buildings and employees) . It has recently established a customer visit centre and will host enterprise customers from around the world.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a spin-out from the pioneering tech company established in a garage in Palo Alto in the 1930s As the name suggests , it is focussed on the needs of large enterprise customers. Through organic development and acquisition, it now offers enterprise-class computing, networking and storage products , integrated in an “edge to cloud” set of solutions. It has particular strength in High Performance Computing which serves the needs of customers on the leading edge of science and engineering.
Mark Gantly FIAE added value by sharing his experience of working for HPE as Site Leader and Director of R&D. He chronicled the development of the Galway site over 50 years, from its establishment as Digital Equipment Corporation in the early 1970s and through the twists and turns of its evolution as Compaq, HP and now HP Enterprise. He indicated that its development is mirrored in many other FDI investments in Ireland with strong site leadership, backed by IDA support, ensuring that sites adopted a ‘transformation’ mindset – continuously scanning for new opportunities particularly those drove the site up the corporate value chain.
This was followed by a Western Region meeting chaired by Padraic O’Donoghue. President Sean Finlay and Tom Leahy Special advisor gave a updated report on the current issues and David Dumigan gave a detailed report on the award of this Year’s Parsons medal.
The planned work programme for the year was discussed with a focus on contributing to the development of a successor to the 5- year strategy 2021-2026. A key highlight of the old strategy was the welcoming of new Fellows many of whom were at mid- career and the target of increasing female membership to 15% was achieved. We now have 18.5% female membership and this progress will be continued in the next plan.
The Academy will continue to provide evidence-based reports and actively support the development of public policy.