An IT giant's plans to double its workforce on the Easter Ross Peninsula have been warmly welcomed as it is an area where jobs announcements at Christmas can still trigger bitter memories.

This because just three miles from Fujitsu's base at Alness lies the town of Invergordon whose aluminium smelter closed at Christmas 1981 with the loss of 890 jobs. The near 40 IT jobs to be created by the Japanese multi-national may be modest in comparison, but there is growing confidence they will not be the last as the area grows in importance to corporate strategy.

The announcement also underlines the restoration of the company's reputation in the north following a troubled time over the £66m contract with the Highland Council, to upgrade and maintain the computer network in every school and local authority office across the region.

Councillors and local press did not hold back in their public criticism, but a steady hand arrived three years ago to take the tiller and steer a surer Highland course. Jim Brophy, Fujitsu's Client Director, admits it wasn't the happiest time for the company in the north "But it was probably the largest transformation programme ever undertaken by a local authority. "

He fixed things, and made sure others were taught how to do the same. The now more amicable relationship with the Highland Council runs till 2016 when the work must go back out to tender, but before then Jim Brophy is confident other local authority contracts will be won.

They will be serviced from Alness, wherever they be in the UK - "We are now promoting the Alness desk as Fujitsu's UK centre for our public sector customers." In anticipation the local team has already moved into larger premises in the Ross-shire town from where they also service the Highland Council contract and those of other clients.

Fujitsu also already employs around 100 staff in Inverness. Jim Brophy says the Highland staff are key to the expansion: "The quality of staff is really high. I think the culture in the Highlands seems to fit a customer service environment. The staff seem to instinctively understand the need to provide quality of contact when clients get in touch seeking help. That first point of contact provides the all important client perception of Fujitsu. A customer having to wait, or go somewhere else to get their problem fixed, can be so damaging to the company."

So Fujitsu ensures all staff members are properly trained to help their customers, whether it be a local authority official coming back from holiday and forgetting his password to a laptop in a school behaving strangely.

But Fujitsu is also involved in more pioneering work in the Highlands. It has launched a pilot project to link a high performance computing (HPC) network hub in Inverness and Easter Ross with computer clusters in other parts of the UK, as well as in Europe, China, Japan and the US.

It means particular tasks, can be completed in minutes or hours rather than days or even weeks. Jim Brophy explains:"For example if a firm needs to create an animation, they have to render it or transpose it into a format that can be used in the film industry, that requires real heavy processing. There is a firm which found that this was taking two to three weeks, but with HPC we have reduced that to 26 minutes. If you think what it could for a small business, it unblocks their whole schedule of work. "But also companies that do fluid dynamics calculations in the oil industry, or wind power generation calculations in the renewable energy sector, are faced with really heaving computing challenges and that's where HPC can help."

So in the next few weeks we will pick two organisations to run the pilot." He is excited about the potential of HPC to attract a wide range of significant commercial players to do business in the Highlands as well as the likes of the University of the Highlands and Islands. He believes HPC could act as a Highland magnet for new inward investment as well as research and development.

It has all been inspired by proposals for a Highland Science Skills Academy aimed at growing science, IT and technology careers. Fujitsu is working with the Highland Council and the group Energy North to develop the HPC idea.

A product of Our Lady's High School in Motherwell and an early computer studies course at Bell College of Technology in Hamilton (now part of the University of the West of Scotland), he launched his career Honeywell Control Systems in Newhouse in1980. Then onwards through Bull Information Systems, Integris, Steria Ltd, Carillion and Capita to Fujitsu, punctuated by takeovers and TUPE transfers.

But he recognised very early in his time at Honeywell that a lifetime of continually updating his technical skills lay ahead in the brave new world of IT. So he decided to move into the service management arena which was still in its infancy. There are many in the Highlands today who are pleased he made the jump.