Fastest Growing Companies

Mishkumi engineers strategic shift into cloud market

May 24, 2017

Editor's Note

Each year, OBJ recognizes the region’s rapidly growing firms with its Fastest Growing Companies awards. The aim is to honour the city’s top performers for substantial, sustainable and profitable growth. Recipients are ranked by their three-year revenue growth. They must have had revenues of at least $100,000 in the first of those three years under consideration. Revenues must have risen to at least $500,000 in their most recent fiscal year.

For Mishkumi Technologies, a changing market became an opportunity for growth.

For most of its history, Mishkumi’s main focus was reselling computer hardware to the federal government. But as interest in cloud-based services started to grow, the company began a transformation of its own, focusing more on helping organizations move into the cloud by offering value-added services.

“Now we’re really a strategic partner,” says Martin Renière, the company’s vice-president. The company is now more focused on services and solutions and has added more people with engineering and software development skills to its team.

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While the federal government remains Mishkumi’s main customer, the firm has increasingly started working with large crown corporations and private companies such as CN, Loto-Québec and Domtar.

“What is appealing to them is our innovation capabilities,” Mr. Renière says. “We really try to focus on being on the cutting edge of all the new technologies, so we can help these companies to stay competitive.”

The increased focus on private-sector customers is a result of those organizations adopting cloud-based technologies at a faster rate than the government. “In terms of adoption, usually the private sector moves faster than the government,” Mr. Renière says.

Still, he sees continued growth opportunities with the federal government as it continues to move into the cloud.

“We’re going to be ready to support the Canadian government when they decide to move forward with some massive initiatives that relate to the cloud,” Mr. Renière says.

Founded: 2007

Local head count: Just under 25 in-house staff; also works with contractors as needed

Product / service: IT consultant and reseller

Three-year revenue growth: 223.8%

Mishkumi is working with some of the largest data centre operators and cloud-services providers in the industry, such as Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft Azure. That allows it to provide services without up-front costs, which Mr. Renière describes as a move from a capital expenditure model to an operating expense model.

He says the company has a big focus on training and certification. Mishkumi’s executives and managers all come from a technical background, which helps them anticipate the market and mentor younger staff, Mr. Renière adds.

“The technology is really moving fast,” he says, “so staying at the forefront really demands some understanding of what is happening in terms of transformation.”

The company has also added more software engineering capabilities in-house. “We add some value, leveraging some analytics, some artificial intelligence,” Mr. Renière says.

Mishkumi hasn’t seen major growth just in its revenues – its employee head count has also been rising quickly. Mr. Renière says the company is adding two to four new employees a month.

(Three-year revenue growth in parenthesis)