In an exclusive interview with The Herald, it's the first news to emerge since the Scotsman reported the closure of the Glasgow office, an interesting appointment on the heels of IBM's CEO for UK & Ireland, (right) Scottish-born Stephen Leonard, who succeeded to the London hot seat in January this year.

Declining to reveal capital investment figures for the Scottish plant, O'Donoghue said the next few years

would be among the most exciting in the site’s 59-year history.“Most of IBM’s revenue now comes from services and that’s also the biggest growth area,”

O'Donoghue is from Port Glasgow and joined IBM in 1988 as a sponsored Chartered Institute of Management Accountants student.
IBM has a 2000-strong workforce at the Renfrewshire site and a further 1000 at a sales and marketing unit in Edinburgh and O'Donohue targets IBM's Smarter Planet strategy as the most exciting currently.

“The world is becoming instrumented," she is quoted saying "We use sensors to see the exact condition of everything. Sensors are being embedded everywhere – in cars, appliances, roads, oil pipelines – even in medicine and livestock.

“At the same time, the world is becoming interconnected. If we use the technology, connectivity and our people in the right way, Scotland can innovate, just like it has done for centuries and transform the next generation into another story of success.

Over in Edinburgh the IBM certified for Dynamic Infrastructure Skills, Barrachd  (left) have been awarded the Dynamic Infrastructure specialty in Energy Efficiency as part of its ongoing commitment to this program.

The success of IBM’s business model, from manufacturer to a global services and software conglomerate is claimed as good news for Greenock as a whole, and pioneered a path for the corporate technology sector.

Services and software now account for some 81% of IBM’s worldwide business, up from about 50% in 2000, but the company has still kept its fabs, and its 300mm fab in East Fishkill, New York,  IBM Building 323 is a fully automated factory based on an advanced computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) architecture and fully automated factory control systems.

O’Donoghue concludes: “In Greenock, we do supply chain management services for companies globally. Most of our client services are focused on procurement outsourcing. We also do logistics, asset management and customer relationship management.