EMC, the world's largest provider of data storage systems, is to open an office in Edinburgh next month, bringing to three the number of the company's offices in Scotland.
The New York listed corporation opened its first Scottish base in Livingston in 1999 with an office to service the oil and gas industry opening in Aberdeen in 2011.
Steady growth in the demand for EMC's consultancy services in data storage, data analytics and cloud computing has seen the number of employees in Scotland grow from an initial five to 70, of which over ten were recruited over the last 12 months.
EMC's Scottish manager Martin Brown said that the new Edinburgh office, in Queen Street, would service customers throughout Scotland and would house around ten sales staff and consultants.
The company's private sector clients include Baillie Gifford, Aberdeen Asset Management, Standard Life, Aegon, Wood Group and the Royal Bank of Scotland while public sector clients include NHS Scotland, the Scottish Government and Scottish Water.
Brown says that an ability to make sense of the large amounts of data available about clients or potential clients will increasingly give companies a real competitive advantage.
As an example, Brown cites the tailor-made marketing offers that banks could make to their customers based on data they hold about previous spending patterns. "If, say, a bank spots that a client regularly spends money in a particular pub at the end of the week and often follows that up by getting a take-away pizza, they could in real-time send that customer a text message letting them know that they could get a special offer on a pizza from somewhere else."
Another example is the development of data analysis systems that would allow a rheumatoid arthritis patient to be prescribed the most effective drugs following a computerised sequencing check of the patient's genome.
Globally, EMC employs 64,000 people in 86 countries with over 1700 in the UK. The Boston-based company does not disclose financial data about its separate countries and regions but in 2013 enjoyed worldwide turnover of $23.21 billion and pre-tax profits of $5.5 billion. It is the global market leader in data storage, with a market share of 29%.
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