Good memories

The telecommunications industry is one of the undoubted success stories of the Irish economy, with thousands of jobs created in the telephone sales, support and marketing service sector - an industry that hardly existed 10 years ago. One of the most active "alternative" telecommunications service providers for the teleservices market is Stentor, which has been involved in a number of high profile call centre developments this year. Stentor's niche is the provision of intelligent telecommunications network services in, to and from the US, Ireland and the UK.

One of its most notable installations this year was Viking Components Europe, one of the world's leading memory chip component manufacturers. Viking's new facility in the Citywest Business Complex, Dublin, includes a call centre operation handling inbound and outbound customer service calls across Europe. As well as carrying national and international traffic for Viking, Stentor is providing direct dialling inward services for telephone based staff.

Other projects include a call centre network for service bureau Faneuil ISG, which is opening an 85 seat call centre in Galway next February with plans to expand to 400 within two years. Stentor's three main markets as defined by operations manager, Paul O'Brien are the corporate retail (primarily virtual private networks for multi-site organisations with locations in Ireland and beyond); call centre and carrier (for example, taking AT&T traffic from the UK to Ireland) markets. The company recently opened an office in London to support these operations.

WorldCom Ireland (formerly TCL Telecom) has been rolling out its fibre optic network during 1997 and recently unveiled Ulster Bank as its first corporate customer. The new network is carrying cross channel and international voice traffic for the bank, but will provide many other services in the future.

Ulster Bank head of technical services, Colm Lyons, described WorldCom as the only company in Ireland that could connect its Dublin office at the IFSC directly to London, Paris, New York and other locations around the world. Global One (the joint venture of Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom and Sprint) established a complete point of presence in Ireland during 1997. The company operates in more than 65 countries around the world and has developed a strong customer base in Ireland over the last 12 months. Earlier this year it announced a partnership agreement with MediaNet Ireland/Club Internet, which will see MediaNet Ireland providing direct links to the Global One core network.