6 cloud computing innovators from Ireland

Simon Edward • 14 February 2025

Ireland's cloud industry is booming. Join us as we celebrate 6 of the innovators who made it happen.

The Irish tech industry punches well above its weight.

Ireland's digital economy is worth $50 billion, accounting for 13% of our GDP. To put that into perspective, Germany's digital economy is worth around $216 billion – a relatively paltry 4.8% of its GDP.

And sure – when you stack them side-by-side, $50 billion might not seem terribly impressive next to $216 billion. Ireland's digital economy is only worth 23% of Germany's. But remember that we achieved that with a population of just five million. Germany's population is more than 16 times larger.

Is there something in the Éire? Quite possibly. As we've covered before, Ireland's cool climate and transatlantic aspect make it the ideal location for new data centres.

But that's only one piece of the puzzle. Irish Government spending and favourable tax conditions have also played their part in the country's tech boom.

And then there's the talent. Ireland seems to have a knack for fostering sons and daughters of industry. These tech-savvy innovators are busy revolutionising all things digital – from fintech to AI to the cloud.

Let's celebrate some of these cloud computing wunderkinder, starting with two brothers from Tipperary.

Patrick and John Collison

Stripe needs little introduction. Headquartered in Dublin, this Irish-American SaaS provider is now the world's largest privately owned fintech company.

The brains behind this behemoth belong to brothers Patrick and John Collison. Raised in the small village of Dromineer in County Tipperary, the brothers went on to found Stripe when they were both in their early 20s.

Precocious? Not half. But for the Collisons, this kind of fearless ambition was par for the course. In 2005, at the age of just 16, Patrick had won first place at the Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition. And in 2016, just six years after founding Stripe, John became the youngest self-made billionaire in history.

The brothers now live in San Francisco – but they haven't left Ireland behind. John, for instance, has funded university programs in his native country, while both Collisons backed a think tank to tackle Ireland's housing crisis.

Adrienne Gormley

Adrienne Gormley's CV reads like a who's who of global tech. The veteran Irish businesswoman has held leadership positions at cloud storage pioneer Dropbox, challenger bank N26 and electronics company Creative Labs. She also spent the best part of a decade at Google.

More recently, Gormley has lent her talents to cloud-powered companies at the vanguard of sustainability and ecology.

From January to December 2024, she was COO of Sylvera – a London-based carbon data provider that helps organisations measure and deliver against net-zero targets.

She's also spent more than two years as an independent board director at Monta. This Danish software company builds solutions to help EV drivers and infrastructure providers make the most of this growing technology.

It's cloud computing for the greater good – and we're all for it.

PJ Hough

PJ Hough was born in Manchester, England, to Irish parents. However, he spent the bulk of his career at Microsoft's offices in Redmond, Washington.

He earns a spot on our list, though, for his tenure as CPO of Citrix – a software company best known for its virtualisation solutions.

Virtualisation is one of the core technologies behind modern cloud computing. And while Citrix isn't as well-known as market leaders like VMware and Oracle, it still netted a not-too-shabby $3.2 billion in revenue in 2021.

While at Citrix, Hough helped develop the company's machine learning capabilities – technologies that are now redefining the digital landscape at large. Hats off to Hough.

Hazel Murray

Hazel Murray has many strings to her digital bow. This Cork-based academic has worked as a cybersecurity lecturer at MTU and a visiting cryptography researcher at the University of Chicago, among other things.

She's also the brains behind QCloud – a visionary new project that provides scalable access to quantum computing resources through the cloud.

Funded by the EU OCRE initiative, QCloud is open to researchers throughout Ireland and is free to use. This means research teams can explore the potential of quantum computing without the need for big bank accounts or bleeding-edge hardware.

The project is powered by Amazon's AWS cloud platform. As Murray told CyberInnovate, "The AWS infrastructure and the research environment developed as part of this project will not only improve the quality of Irish quantum research but will also provide ease of collaboration between national and international distributed research teams, promoting cross border collaboration and resource sharing".

Sean O'Sullivan

Sean O'Sullivan is a bit of a wildcard entry. See, it's debatable whether he's "from Ireland". This Irish-American entrepreneur and philanthropist was born in New York City, some 3,000 miles from the Emerald Isle.

In any case, the Irish have taken O'Sullivan under their wings. The MapInfo founder is easily as famous here as he is in his native country – thanks in no small part to his appearances on RTÉ's Dragon's Den.

And Irish or not, he's earned a spot on our list. Without him, we might have ended up referring to the cloud by a very different name. Like "the tangle". Or "the big network thing". Or something even worse.

Yes, O'Sullivan is widely credited with coining the term "cloud computing" back in 1996. In a business plan for his NetCentric startup, he envisioned a world where "applications that had previously run on your desktop PC or on your local area network would run on the internet itself".

As we now know, the cloud encompasses a little more than that. But as an early attempt at a very big idea, it's not far off the mark.

Based in Cork, Ireland, Ascend Cloud Solutions is a home-grown cloud consulting company with a global outlook. We help clients around the world accelerate their ambition with cloud migration support, security consulting and cost optimisation services. Want to make more of the cloud? Get in touch with our experts to arrange a free discovery call.

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