The International Institute of Telecommunications, which is headquartered in Montreal, has published a study about the information technology industry in Canada [PDF]. The study, which was undertaken by consulting firm SECOR, shows the importance of IT in Canada’s economy, and also compares investements in Canada and in other countries.
- IT grows 8% each year in Canada, and represents 6% of the PIB. The growth outpaces easily overall PIB growth,
- 50% of private R&D is done in information technology, even though public investment is very low,
- investment and growth of IT in Canada is below Finland’s, Sweden, South Korea, Japan and USA.
They also used the study to auto-congratulate themselves for their cutting-edge infrastructures. For instance, OZ, a startup in web2.0 services for mobile phones, used IIT’s mobile network and installations in Montreal to develop and test their products. TelcoBridges also used IIT’s 3G hardware, instead of going to the US or Asia.
On the other hand, the Information and Communications Technology Council published yesterday their predictions for Canada’s IT sector. They estimate that $8 billion in software, $16.9 billions in hardware and $19.7 billion in IT services will be spent till 2010. From that amount, $7.4 billion will be in Québec, and most of the expenses will be in security and in the finance industry.
I am leaving to the reader the exercise of estimating how much of that amount is going to be wasted in unproductive workflows and legacy technologies… ok. I am a bit blasé, but I was just thinking that if only a few entrepreneurs got a tiny fraction of those investments, then we would have had world-class startups locally.
