Montreal Tech Watch

Morgan Stanley, a Wall Street investment bank, has opened yesterday an IT development center in Montréal, investing up to $200 million and creating 500 jobs in 5 years.

The bank already has 18 other IT development centers throughout the world, and was considering opening a new center in an Eastern Europe country, but chose finally Montréal.

This tells a lot about Montréal, where salaries are much lower than those found in New York city. The province also introduced recently new tax credits, up to 30% of the salary for each employee, with Morgan Stanley being the first big company to benefit from it. A third reason why Montréal was chosen was that it had the same time zone as New York city. I am not sure that the word “offshore” development center was used, but when the bank representative talked about developping systems for the New York City office, it pretty much looks like it.

Great news then for finance/math/CS grads. Great also because this might spun off a couple of finance-related emerging companies.

For those who came to Blitzweekend (view reports about the event), you might be interested in the Ottawa Web Weekend event, which is due in 10 days. The goal is to gather a group of entrepreneurs and developers to create a startup in one weekend, much alike the original startupweekend format.

Unfortunately, we hadn’t anyone from Ottawa coming to Blitzweekend, but I was in touch with Marc-André Plouffe for a while to get them to send a team to Blitzweekend. He’s been helpful in spreading the word there, and so I want now to publicize this.

So get there for one weekend if you want to know what’s a startup like, and have the thrill of creating a product in just 2-3 days. Who knows, maybe that’s what you were born for; and it might just be the starting point for bigger plans.