Ireland sits inside our core market alongside the UK, not as occasional cross-border work. Here's how we deliver governed Power BI and Fabric projects for Irish businesses without a Dublin office, and what that means for cost, governance and pace.
Every few months we hear a version of the same question from a business in Dublin, Cork or Galway: can you actually do this properly if you are not based here? It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that Ireland does not get a stripped-down version of how we work. It gets the same model as everyone else, delivered from Leeds instead of Dublin.
Dublin is one of Europe’s biggest hubs for technology, pharmaceutical, and financial services multinationals, and that scale has pulled the wider Irish economy along with it. Mid-market businesses across the country have adopted the Microsoft stack heavily, particularly Dynamics 365 Business Central and Power BI, and most now sit on more data than their reporting can make sense of. The problem is rarely the technology. It is finding delivery that matches the size of the business: too small for the Dublin office of a global consultancy, too specialised for a generalist local IT provider.
That is a deliberate gap for us to sit in, not a default. Ireland is inside our primary market alongside the UK, not treated as occasional cross-border work picked up when the timing suits. We currently work with Ireland-based clients running Dynamics 365 Business Central and Power BI, and the demand we see is for governed, decision-first analytics work: the kind currently split between the Dublin offices of large consultancies and generalist local IT providers, with less choice in between for a business that wants dedicated Power BI and Fabric depth without enterprise-consultancy overhead.
We do not have a Dublin office, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we have instead is a Leeds base that is roughly an hour’s flight from Dublin, used on the rare occasions a project genuinely needs someone in the room. Most of the work, discovery, build and review, happens the same way it does for our UK clients: scheduled calls, shared workspaces, and a governed delivery cadence that does not depend on anyone being on a plane.
Cost is usually the next question, given how differently some consultancies price cross-border work. We do not run a separate rate card for Ireland. Every engagement, UK or Ireland, is scoped and priced the same way: fixed price, fixed scope, agreed upfront, with currency and invoicing arrangements settled at the scoping stage rather than negotiated after the contract is signed.
Governance is the one area where Ireland genuinely is different, not harder, just different. Irish businesses answer to the Data Protection Commission rather than the UK’s ICO, and any cross-border data flows between an Irish entity and a UK-based delivery team need to be governed properly rather than assumed. We handle that as part of the initial scoping conversation, not as an afterthought once a project is already underway.
Running an existing Microsoft partner or Dynamics implementation is not a reason to wait, either. We regularly work alongside another partner’s ERP or CRM implementation, building the analytics layer on top rather than competing for the same contract. The starting point is the same as it is for any new client: a conversation about what decisions the business is actually trying to make, followed by a fixed-price proposal, not an open-ended discovery retainer.
Simon Devine
Part of the Hopton Analytics team, delivering governed analytics programmes for UK mid-market organisations.