It’s great to see so much positive change happening in the Canadian landscape with respect to cloud education and adoption. We believe that is due in no small part to the hard work and innovative vision that organizations like CANARIE have for the future of high tech networking and infrastructure in Canada. The DAIR program, which was launched in 2013 is a great example of that (http://www.canarie.ca/cloud/), it has provided Canadian entrepreneurs and small businesses with free cloud-based compute and storage resources that help speed up time to market by enabling rapid and scalable product design, prototyping, validation and demonstration. Since its inception, the DAIR program enabled many new Canadian startups to benefit from the scale, speed and agility of cloud technologies to transform their business processes and get to market faster.
DAIR has spurred small businesses to embrace the cloud, and we’re doing our part to help this by offering DAIR graduates with $500 in migration consulting services as well as $250 dollars in free infrastructure on Cloud-A. With the growing awareness of the program and number of graduates on the rise we are seeing a lot of appreciation for our cloud as it also leverages OpenStack at it’s core and as a result allows users to leverage API driven infrastructure and utility billing that the CANARIE’s DAIR graduates are familiar with.
One thing that is relatively unique about our model in Canada is that we do not offer consulting or services work to prevent any channel conflict with our partners. We believe that this is the best model so that our customers public cloud infrastructure can be logically separate and distinct from the DevOps delivery as many organizations have varying degrees of this skill set in house. As a result we often recommend qualified consulting and service integration partners when we identify the need for it. We’ve seen this result in a true win/win not only for our partners but also for our clients who often struggle to find the right talent who can successfully and securely deliver value in this rapidly changing space.
We’ve now had more than 400 small businesses use DAIR to accelerate product development cycles and learn first-hand how cloud technologies can transform their business. We are delighted that Cloud-A is supporting our graduates as they launch their products commercially
Randy Jones, Senior Director,
Technology Innovation, CANARIE
More About Migration to Cloud A from the CANARIE / DAIR Process:
https://www.clouda.ca/canarie-dair-graduation-program/
Here you can read more about a case study of a client who is a recent CANARIE / DAIR graduate:
https://www.clouda.ca/blog/general/case-study-migration-from-canarie-dair-to-cloud-a/