TORONTO, ON – It looks like SOTI wants to become a household name, albeit one associated with Canada.
At its first ever SYNC conference in downtown Toronto, the Mississauga, ON-based enterprise mobile management (EMM) company announced that it would invest $150 million over the next three years to expand its business.
Among these investments is a new five-acre campus, at least 300 new jobs (which will almost double its current workforce) and $50 million set aside for research and development.
“You don’t want to just hire people, we want the best and brightest,” Carl Rodrigues, SOTI chief executive told CDN. The new facility, to be built near Britannia and Highway 10, will have amenities inspired those of top tech companies such as Google.
He said that some of the research that SOTI will be doing at the new location include connected cars, IoT, and an app generation platform that is able to create an app in minutes.
The company also has a research and innovation lab located in Waterloo, Ontario.
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Part of SOTI’s new strategy, he said, was to focus on selling product in Canada. Even though the company has existed for some 20 years, its markets for its solutions such as MobiControl were first the U.S., then Western Europe, followed by Australia and New Zealand.
Despite its smaller domestic effort, he Rodrigues said, competitors that have emerged over the years have largely focused on the “white collar” office workers, leaving many other industries in the country ripe for the picking.
These include transport and logistics, postal services, couriers, airlines, the cruise ship business, trains, retail, distribution, healthcare, trucking, car rental companies, and education.
“There’s greater adoption in other parts of the world, but Canadian corporations are starting to adopt EMM solutions as well,” Rodrigues said. “It’s a matter of us educating them through webinars, education, outreach to show them what is possible. It’s about time.”