Letter to the business editor - Bring data centres to Scotland

I WAS very pleased to read your article announcing IBM's plans to locate a centre to provide data storage hosting facilities for SMEs in Scotland ('£2m IT Investment' Briefs, October 5). Cisco has been campaigning to bring such investment to Scotland for some time now.

Scotland is an ideal choice for organisations to locate their data storage centre. The property and running costs are relatively low here and we are not on any geographic fault line which would put us at high risk of natural disasters. Our reliable power and good network connectivity to the rest of the world also put Scotland in a strong position.

We have a skilled workforce who would be able to support such activity effectively. And unlike some previous investments, once a company had committed to having their data centre in Scotland, this would difficult to move once in place. Finally, the weather is perfect in terms of temperature and humidity for such centres.

The scale of this inward investment in Scotland could run into billions of pounds and the creation of thousands of jobs. Cisco will continue to campaign on this issue for Scotland. I look forward to the next data centre announcement.

Richard Moir, chief technology officer, Cisco Scotland