Thales Canada will be relocating its workers who are currently spread out across three locations in the National Capital Region to a single new office at 500 Palladium Dr. in Kanata by the end of the year, a company executive has confirmed.
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A prominent defence and security firm is expanding its local office footprint by 30 per cent and plans to hire dozens of additional employees in Ottawa over the next 12 months as demand for its defence, digital identity and cybersecurity products grows.
Thales Canada will be relocating its workers who are currently spread out across three locations in the National Capital Region to a single new office at 500 Palladium Dr. in Kanata by the end of the year, a company executive has confirmed.
The Canadian branch of French defence giant Thales Group will occupy about 112,000 square feet of space on two floors that were formerly leased to DRS Technologies, Thales Canada vice-president of strategy and government relations Carla Salci told OBJ.
The company’s 400 local employees currently work in three separate offices at 1 Chrysalis Way as well as 14 and 20 Colonnade Rd. The new space boosts Thales Canada’s total office footprint in Ottawa by about 25,000 square feet, giving the company more room to grow as it looks to hire at least 50 additional workers in the next year, Salci explained.
“It is exciting times for the company in Canada,” she said.
Bringing everyone in the Thales fold together under one roof will also make it easier to tap into “synergies” between different departments, Salci added.
“Just the cross-pollination of smart minds having lunch together, interacting in the hallways, is really I think a powerful motivator for us to consolidate and bring people together,” she said in an interview during last week’s CANSEC trade show at the EY Centre.
Thales Canada is a major player in the defence and security industry, with about 1,400 employees nationwide. The company moved its headquarters to Ottawa from the Greater Toronto Area last year after it divested its rail transportation business.
While the National Capital Region has been a major R&D hub for Thales for decades, it became even more important to the company's overall operations in 2019, when Thales Group acquired Netherlands-based digital security firm Gemalto for about $7.3 billion.
The deal effectively doubled the size of Thales’s local workforce overnight, adding new expertise in digital security and cybersecurity to the company’s existing local programs that included providing systems integration and software development services for the Canadian Army, the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Thales now provides a range of security offerings, including ID verification products for customers such as the RCMP and the Canada Border Services Agency as well as data encryption and cybersecurity products to government and enterprise clients.
Many of those products are made in Ottawa, such as Thales’s hardware security modules – hardened, tamper-resistant devices designed to safely store cryptographic keys. The products are developed in the National Capital Region, which serves as one of Thales Group’s engineering centres of excellence.
Salci says she expects the new Kanata office to keep growing in importance as a research hub thanks to the region’s depth of tech talent as well as its proximity to government clients like the Department of National Defence and facilities such as Area X.O, a 1,900-acre testing ground for autonomous vehicles, drones and other emerging technologies in the city’s south end.
“If we want to continue to be a strong presence in the defence and security sectors, Ottawa is the place to be,” she added.
In addition to having a new headquarters, Thales Canada will also soon have a new leader.
The company recently announced that Chris Pogue, who has served as CEO since August 2021, will be stepping down on June 13.
A Thales Canada spokesperson told OBJ Thursday the company is “hoping to announce his replacement shortly.”
