US software services company NetSuite is to open a major data centre in Dublin, bringing one of Silicon Valley’s largest and fastest-growing cloud-based software companies to Ireland for the first time.

NetSuite will partner with Telecity Group to provide data centre services to NetSuite’s European customer base, which NetSuite chief executive Zach Nelson said make up about a fourth of the company’s 24,000 customers.

The data centre will be operational before the end of the year.

NetSuite offers a set of software services that customers use to manage company operations and customer relationships. NetSuite doesn’t sell software, but access to cloud-based software products, accessed via the internet.

According to Nelson, Europe is NetSuite’s fastest growing market. Two of the company’s flagship products for managing corporate operations and financials, OneWorld and SuiteCommerce, have multi-language, tax and currency capabilities that suit Europe’s varied markets, the company said.

The data centre will initially employ about 10 people, but Nelson indicated the company — which has not had any operations here before —was very likely to expand its presence.

“We expect Ireland to become our largest data centre outside the US,” he said in an interview from a company event in London. “And our history has been that once we put a footprint down, we tend to expand.”

NetSuite’s Dublin data centre “is a beachhead”, he added.

A second mirroring data centre in Amsterdam will enable data to be shared and backed up between the two European locations, providing extra data and operational security.

Nelson said a key reason for creating the European data centres would be to meet European data protection and privacy requirements. The new centres “give the company an advantage as the regulatory environment changes,” he said.

The NetSuite announcement comes in the wake of today’s landmark European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling in the case brought by Austrian law student Max Schrems against the Irish Data Protection Commissioner over the safety of his Facebook data.

The ECJ has effectively ruled that European data cannot be exported to the US, because the Safe Harbour agreements between the US and EU fail to ensure data protection that meets EU legal requirements.

Responding to the ruling, Nelson said NetSuite will be well placed to meet any new requirements to keep EU data securely within Europe.

“With the new data centres, we can keep every piece of data in Europe,” from the point when software is developed through to the its implementation by a company, he said.