Canadian Startups Push the Limits in CENGN’s Cloud

“CENGN was set up with a grant from the Canadian federal government to aid the advancement and commercialization of small and medium enterprises,” says Richard Waterhouse, vice president of business development and marketing at CENGN. “CENGN offers infrastructure, expertise, and an ecosystem to help small and medium-size companies commercialize their products or services.”

To support the work of dozens of one-of-a-kind innovators, the CENGN engineering team took a DevOps approach to its cloud platform. It provides OpenStack cloud services, container-based NFVi, and carrier-grade Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). With a network-as-code service, compute, storage, and network resources can be fluidly and immediately available as needed.

 “We describe what we do as ‘network crafting,’” says Boris Mimeur, vice president of engineering operations at CENGN. “Modern integration, programmability, and automation have always been our focus.”

CENGN also plays an important role in developing the next generation of tech talent. Historically, many graduates from Canadian colleges and universities who have science, technology, engineering, and math degrees opt to work outside the country.“I want our next generation of professionals to interact with the network in a programmatic way,” Mimeur says.

CENGN makes a vital contribution across the nation—and ultimately our interconnected world. It works with technology vendors and communities in the rural and northern Ontario communities to improve residential broadband.

With a steady flow of technology innovators, Mimeur is confident that its cloud infrastructure will scale gracefully and CENGN’s investment is protected. “With an automated and programmable network, migrating to a 400-Gbps fabric spine is an incremental change,” Mimeur says. CENGN will be ready, helping startups innovate and digitally transform the world into a more sustainable place and preparing bright young minds to lead Canada’s technology innovation.