PwC introduces its Menlo Park brand to Europe

For just over a decade, the closest thing the information technology industry has to an encyclopaedia has landed onto corporate and research desks mid-year, as reliably as a new copy of the phone book.

About the same size as the Yellow Pages for a city the size of Dublin, PricewaterhouseCooper's (PwC) annual Technology Forecast is just as useful - a massive compendium of detailed articles, predictions and analysis on current technologies and services.

Illustrations of how the latest microchips are constructed, or how a satellite wireless network transmits data, or diagrams of how a storage network might be assembled add some colour, as do the inevitable bar graphs and pie charts.

All in all, it's a slice of geek heaven. It's also a longer-term source of amusement and I-told- you-sos. One can go back through past editions to see which predictions came true; which technologies sizzled, and which fizzled.

In the fast-changing world of IT, the Forecast is a reminder of the industry 's passions and foibles at a particular moment in time.

This massive tome, and the relatively small PwC division that researches and produces it, was "one of those accidental rolling balls that just got bigger", says Mr Bo Parker, one of the technologists and editors of the forecast.

In the 1990s, what was then simply Price Waterhouse, sans Coopers, focused on big accounting firms as clients. Like many business sectors, the financial industry was having to come to terms with the influx of new technology into its old-style operations.

Mr Parker was very interested in the emerging area of artificial intelligence (AI) systems - computer software programs that could analyse and predict and solve problems. "I was fundamentally convinced that if an accounting firm wasn't knowledgable about AI, it would be automated out of business."

Price Waterhouse realised it needed a small division that specialised in IT knowledge. Full of engineers, its primary task was to write code, producing specialised software for clients. But gradually it began also to provide IT advice on areas such as AI.

Thus was PwC's Technology Center in Menlo Park, California, born.

"We just loved to talk about where technology was going," says Mr Parker, who was in Dublin last week to talk about future technologies at the Goodbody Stockbrokers SummiT technology investment conference at UCD.

The problem was, everyone else in the firm loved to ring them up to talk tech as well, asking questions that customers had put to them. "They got so many calls, they couldn't get their jobs done and code," he says.

So the talk turned into a print report for internal use, the fledging Technology Forecast. But of course, clients also liked having such things on their own shelves, and the Technology Center was inundated with requests for extra copies.

In 1990, the forecast became an official publication that now runs close to 1,000 pages - although these days you can get the whole thing on CD-Rom as well, thus keeping some shelf space clear. The forecast remains only part of the story, though, as the Technology Center has become a crucial part of what PwC does, full of consulting technologists that can also talk.

"My highest criterion is to see that they have both a deep understanding of how technology works but also good communication skills - a good sense of analogy and metaphor," says Mr Parker.

Now, PwC has decided to move the Technology Center concept to Europe, with the recent establishment of a London-based technology centre called, rather unmellifluously, "Menlo Park Europe".

With a starting staff of five, with Mr Parker as its managing director, the reason for the new centre is twofold. First, he says PwC now has a large European client base and the company can work more closely with them by having a European tech centre.

"But also, Europe has been slowly investing itself in emerging tech sectors. This has created a dynamic where European countries have to think about where future economic growth is coming from," he says.

"A big reason for setting up here now is that it's the right time in the context of what's happening here. It's likely that the next big companies - the next Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco - will come from here. Also, being here, we can feed intellectual knowledge back to Menlo Park for the forecast. You can get a bit myopic if you're in the Valley all the time," he says.

He offers the obvious example of European leadership and developments in the telecommunications and wireless arena. It is difficult to sense what is really happening in Europe, to catch the buzz, while looking out from within the US, he believes.

His reason for a particular interest in this area is made obvious later, in his address to the conference. Wireless data applications and services are going to reinvigorate the technology industry and swell the next wave of innovation, he thinks.

Wireless is going to be as monumental as the arrival of the internet; not right away, but over the next decade, as applications develop, he says. If that's the case, no wonder he wants to be on the ground here, where the sector is developing more rapidly because the Europeans tend to agree in advance on common standards, he says.

Menlo Park Europe in London, which launched in October, is just the start - PwC is already eyeing Frankfurt as a sister centre, and if this concept of having four to five people working collaboratively in small "hubs" works well, PwC will also place a team in Asia, he says.

Which is all very well, but does he really think calling the London office "Menlo Park Europe" triggers any name recognition in Europeans? Menlo Park is an upscale Silicon Valley town adjacent to its more famous cousin, Palo Alto, about halfway between San Francisco and San Jose.

While Palo Alto is now famed as the birthplace of the modern Valley - Stanford University there has spun out hundreds of entrepreneurs, HP and Apple were started in Palo Alto garages, and it is the community of choice for many technology titans when home-buying - Menlo Park is less glittery.

The town is best known for the venture capitalists swarming along its Sand Hill Road, a bookstore, Keplers, beloved of the tech crowd, and some choice eateries on Santa Cruz Avenue.

Oh, and it was named by two Galway immigrants who called their 19th century ranch after their home village of Menlough.

Mr Parker laughs a bit sheepishly. "We went round and round and round about this. Fundamentally, the Menlo Park Technology Center is a branded entity with a very specific group of people, in the financial services industry, for example. These are the people we work with most. It doesn't make sense to try and create a new brand."

So Menlo Park Europe it is.