A research centre which specialises in developing technologies for the mobile telecommunications industry was officially opened at Athlone Institute of Technology today.

The Minister for Innovation Policy, Michael Ahern, TD, opened the SUNAT Applied Research Centre. The centre has been approved for €1.25 million in funding under Enterprise Ireland’s Applied Research Enhancement Programme.

SUNAT stands for Seamless Use through Network Abstraction Technologies. It is envisaged that research developments in the centre will make it easy for companies that are not specialists in IT to mobilise their products, services and workforces.

The President of AIT, Professor Ciarán Ó Catháin, praised the Applied Research Enhancement Programme, saying that it "encourages and facilitates the applied research orientation of the institutes of technology. This is smart investment in our higher education sector, where the distinctive strengths of the IoTs are recognised and valued in their own right.

"The focus on applied research is particularly laudable. This is an area where AIT enjoys considerable success, and according to a recent Circa report, the institute is one of the most successful in Ireland when compared with universities and fellow institutes of technology," Professor Ó Catháin stated.

He continued: "The SUNAT programme will create a centre to undertake world class research in adaptive networking technologies and create outputs that will have a direct benefit for the Border, Midlands and West region and indeed for Ireland in general, through intellectual property creation and technology transfer."

Minister Michael Ahern said that: “The SUNAT Applied Research Centre represents a valuable research resource for industry, and as such it will complement other activities carried out by AIT’s Software Research Centre.” The centre, would, he said, “form partnerships with local industry to work on challenging problems and facilitate technology transfer among the participants”. The Software Research Centre (SRC) was established in AIT in 2003. The SRC has secured applied research and technology transfer funding in excess of €3.5 million to date, and the centre intends to increase its team of researchers to at least fifty in the next few years.

The Software Research Centre (SRC) was established in AIT in 2003. The SRC has secured applied research and technology transfer funding in excess of €3.5 million to date, and the centre intends to increase its team of researchers to at least fifty in the next few years.