A startup’s journey doesn’t end when it is acquired by another firm.
That’s one of the messages Trend Micro’s chief operating officer Wael Mohamed is bringing to a celebration Friday night at Chateau Montebello.
About 40 tech and business leaders will be there marking the 10th anniversary of Ottawa software security startup Third Brigade, and its acquisition five years later by Trend Micro.
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Mr. Mohamed was a co-founder of Third Brigade but is now based out of Trend’s Dallas office.
He is clearly still very proud of the Ottawa operation and the team in place here, and that is one of the other messages he will deliver at the celebration.
“Hopefully, we can draw more attention to our cause here in Ottawa, since we are literally open for hiring,” he said.
Trend’s vice-president of data centre research and development, Bill McGee, said a lot of people measure success by the ability to build a company that gets acquired.
“What we really felt was the true measure of success is that one or two years later that the company that acquired us was still happy they acquired us, and usually it’s the case that they’re not for some reason,” said Mr. McGee, who is based in Ottawa.
He said he e-mailed Trend CEO Eva Chen a year after the acquisition. She was still happy.
According to Mr. Mohamed, cloud computing is the reason for Trend’s explosive growth.
“Cloud computing is the biggest, fastest, most transformational thing happening in our industry in the last 30 years and we are in the middle of it,” he said. “And Ottawa is a centre of excellence for protecting it.”
Mr. Mohamed points to Amazon web services as a business that he predicts will be worth $8 billion-$10 billion in 2015.
“As more people see it’s cheaper, faster and quicker to put their computing needs into the cloud and they need to be able to be as protected as (they were) in their data centres, we will grow with that curve,” he said. “We’re seeing hundreds of percent growth quarter to quarter for the last few years and we anticipate that will not slow down for the next few years.”
Mr. Mohamed says the exciting thing is that much of that growth will happen in Ottawa.
“Our doors are open,” he said.
