BRITISH IT firm CloudMigrator365 is setting up an office in Belfast, creating 17 jobs in the process.
The Manchester-headquartered company provides cloud migration and consultancy services and its own innovative software products to a global customer base.
The new jobs, to be created by 2018, have been backed by £85,000 from Invest Northern Ireland.
The company's managing director Darren Mawhinney is originally from Antrim.
He said he hoped to emulate the success of "local IT giants" Brendan Mooney of Kainos and Brian Baird, formerly of ICL.
“While CloudMigrator365 is established across worldwide markets, we see an opportunity to grow our partner sales channel, build on our capabilities to sell and deliver migration services and ensure our marketing messages reach as wide a global audience as possible," said Mr Mawhinney.
“Establishing our Belfast team is central to this strategy and our plans to recruit 17 tech sales, development and support roles over the next two years will give us the resources needed to achieve our objectives.
"The talented workforce, cluster of software development businesses and cost competitive environment attracted us to Northern Ireland and we are confident our workforce in Belfast will be a valuable asset to our company."
Economy minister Simon Hamilton described the company as "a leader in its field".
"The availability and quality of our talent, competitive cost base and Invest Northern Ireland support has attracted this leading software company to Northern Ireland," he said.
“These jobs will pay an average salary of £34,000 providing high quality well paid employment opportunities for our talented graduates as well as experienced professionals in the ICT sector.
“Northern Ireland is gaining a well deserved reputation as a region where tech businesses are thriving with flourishing clusters including cyber security, financial software and data analytics. The global market for cloud services is expected to grow exponentially over the next decade - this investment puts Belfast at the centre of CloudMigrator365’s development strategy.”
