Calgary may be called the heart of the New West, but a fresh pulse starts beating this week for this city’s rapidly growing new economy with the official opening of the expanded Calgary’s Technology Centre on Thursday.
The state-of-the-art, 120,000-sq.-ft. complex in University Research Park will be a virtual home page of ideas and innovations from more than 75 Calgary techno-companies and those providing services to the sector who want their environment to reflect their cutting-edge approach to e-business.
“This is not just a physical bricks-and-mortar environment,” says John Masters, president and CEO of Calgary Technologies Inc. CTI is a joint partnership of the City of Calgary, the Calgary Chamber of Commerce and the University of Calgary, which works with the city’s e-commerce and advanced technology communities in developing and expanding their operations.
About 25 of the companies at the new centre are “virtual” or off-site clients, who can take advantage of a shared office which includes furniture, a computer with secured, segregated storage on the centre’s server and high-speed data access.
The official opening of the new centre is the latest chapter in the rebranding of what used to be the Calgary Research and Development Authority. Masters says the CRDA was founded in 1981, when the terms high-tech and knowledge-based industries weren’t exactly in vogue and R&D “meant people walking around in white lab coats.”
Back then, Calgary’s tech sector was estimated to have 10,000 employees, generating about $1 billion in revenue each year.
Calgary Technologies Inc. now estimates the city’s advanced technology community at 50,000 knowledge-based professionals, generating about $9 billion in revenue.
“Today, it’s not white lab coats,” says Masters. “It’s young men and women sitting in front of desktops creating intellectual property.”
The new centre will be named after one of Calgary’s prominent business leaders, with the official announcement during opening ceremonies Thursday. More than 200 of Calgary’s high-tech executives and government officials are expected to attend.
Incubator manager Dave MacKillop says the companies range from those still ‘in the garage’ to publicly traded firms. “For a small start-up, to have access to something like this, they’d never be able to do it on their own. This is a pretty prestigious address.”
The centre has invested more than $250,000 in its meeting rooms, the features of which include smart consoles and white boards, video-teleconferencing capabilities and high-speed data ports. There are labs and prototype development facilities, and security doors separate client offices from public areas.
Sylvie Monette-Houle, president of Rockwave International Business Consultants Inc., says networking opportunities at the centre are invaluable.
“I wanted to be closer to the clients and learn with them. There’s a lot of informal information circulating and networking happening, and I wanted to be part of that network,” she says. “But it doesn’t happen by itself, the synergies of being together. The tenants work at it and make it happen,” with organized networking luncheons and informal Friday social events.
In-house clients include PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Statistics Canada and software companies Apps on the Web Inc. and CLINICARE Corporation.
Occupancy rates have hit 90 per cent, according to CTC officials.
For CLINICARE, a medical software company which services more than 2,500 doctors in Canada and the U.S., moving into the new centre was part of a larger image makeover and product re-branding.
“We’ve been around for 17 years and we had a very conservative look to us, and perhaps old-fashioned,” says Brent Mitchell, marketing manager for CLINICARE. “We wanted to become more modern in our projection, and this move was perhaps the most important part.”
CLINICARE moved out of its old digs on Flint Road on July 1 to become the anchor tenant on the third floor of the new facility, with 8,000 sq. ft. of office space and an option for more. The company also recently launched a subsidiary company, BridgeComm, which specializes in networking and firewall security issues, and Mitchell says the networking possibilities in the centre’s high-tech environment were a real incentive.
The centre will also be the home for the new eSecurity Innovation Centre, a leading-edge computer security training and research centre developed as a joint initiative between the U of C and JAWZ Inc. which will have its official opening in January.
Masters says the technology sector in Calgary is playing a more pivotal role in a business community traditionally dominated by oil and gas. There are already more than 3,000 technology firms in Calgary working in areas such as telecommunications, software development and applications and wireless equipment manufacturing.
Calgary represents 58 per cent of Alberta’s technology employment, with growth having increased nearly 10 per cent since 1988.
Masters says the new centre will showcase Calgary as the hub of the New West Economy. He agrees the tech market has been somewhat overheated in North America, but “I think this economy is much less cyclical than the commodity-based economies we have tended to rely on in the past.”
“Because our technology sector is sprinkled with lots of little companies, and they are so diversified and also mainly internationally focused, they’re not dependent on one factor or another like currency or interest rates, or the supply of raw resources such as oil or gas.”
The open house will be held Thursday from 12:30 to 6 p.m. at the Calgary’s Technology Centre, 3553 31st St. N.W.
