Business analytics company SAS is investing €40m in a new Dublin hub, expanding its team six-fold with the hiring of 150 people over the next three years.

The company will use its new inside sales and customer care facility to assist business across the EMEA region, with it based in NexusUCD “initially”.

Roles will include multilingual business development and sales specialists, customer engagement specialists, data scientists and software engineers.

“As a global company with offices all over the world, we wanted to expand in a city as vibrant as Dublin, which has such a thriving technology ecosystem,” said SAS’s Carl Farrell.

“We are now experiencing a ‘democratisation of analytics’, where more and more organisations – including small to medium-sized enterprises – are investing in analytical software and services that don’t require a significant upfront investment.”

Data jobs in Ireland

It all adds to Ireland’s position as a big data giant in the near future, just in time.

In April, we found out Zalando was locating in Dublin. The news meant a jobs bonanza of 200 new positions. However, these positions weren’t for designers or models, they were for data scientists and STEM graduates who could work in R&D.

Already there exists a community of employers in Ireland for whom data is their lifeblood, including: AOL; Aon; Tableau Software; Twitter; Pramerica; Fidelity; Bank of America Merrill Lynch; Quantcast, TripAdvisor and Paddy Power, to name a few.

SAS’ expansion will simply add to that.

“Our new centre will provide the extra capacity needed to support customers as they embark on this data analytics journey,” said Farrell.

“Organisations in the region will now have access to knowledge, advice and powerful analytics to enable them to make more informed decisions and improve their business operations.”

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