| Where Not To Set Up Shop If You Want To Stay In Business! If you are a Canadian software developer or a high tech equipment manufacturer the last place you want to set up shop is in Ottawa, the nation’s capital. Michael Cowpland learned this the hard way (read The Power Of The Small-minded). Terry Matthews, who, with Cowpland, founded Mitel is only now learning this lesson, but if he acts quickly and moves his company as far away from Ottawa as possible he may avoid Corel’s fate. The gutted company that is Bell Canada (a story on the hollowing out of Bell in Doing Google before Google did Google), acting as front man for Mitel’s biggest foreign competitor, has convinced the City of Ottawa to give CISCO of San Jose California the contract to supply the City with all its electronics commutations needs, including an internet (VOIP) based telephone system. Then there is Nortel’s sad demise. Being in the government’s backyard made no difference; it is as if it was hiding in plain sight. On the other hand, if you are a foreign competitor, the best place to set up a sales office is in Ottawa. Being in the national capital means you can easily entice bureaucrats with trips to exotic locations to make your sales pitch; locations far enough to require jet travel, and one or more overnights stays in a luxury hotel where you can wine and dine them in discreet, inviting surroundings. If you’re company is based in Ottawa, you can’t always do that, and that is a real disadvantage. Every year Zanthe held an annual ZIM Conference where both clients and potential clients were invited to view the latest and greatest version of ZIM. These conferences, to save money, were usually held in Ottawa. This was a mistake. Getting Canadian government officials to attend these conferences was often next to impossible — no travel or overnight stay involve. At one conference where Zanthe had assemble a impressive list of speakers from the United States, the Netherlands, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, from the new Republic of Slovenia... to talk about their experiences with ZIM, they could not get a single government client to come and talk about their experiences with the product (Denis Podolsky, the civil engineer who took a chance on ZIM and the Boreal Shell was no longer at Indian and Northern Affairs (read Who Killed CAMS?), and new management had decided to enforce the Department’s standard which was Oracle. ZIM’s days there were numbered). Not only did Zanthe fail to get a single government client to talk about their experiences, they could not get a single federal government bureaucrat to attend the conference. This did not inspire confidence in ZIM’s international customers who had come to Ottawa expecting to hear at least one government official explain why ZIM was an excellent investment. On another occasion, to showcase the newly release ZIM for Windows, Zanthe held its annual conference at the National Arts Center, a renowned venue in the heart of Ottawa next to a world heritage site, the legendary Rideau Canal. Again clients from all over the world flocked to the capital; and again not a single federal bureaucrat could be convinced to show up even when Zanthe waived their fees for attending the conference. One conference participant from Greece came up to me and looking around he asked: “Ottawa is the capital of Canada, is that right?” “Yes,” I said. “Then, where are the government people?” I sheepishly replied that since Zanthe was based in Ottawa, government officials did not need to come to an international conference to find out what was new with ZIM. It was a crock, and he knew it. You almost heard him asking himself, “If government people did not attend such an important conference could it be it was because they knew something about ZIM that he didn’t?” The next year Zanthe lost a major Athens-based client. Maybe that was the guy. Bernard Payeur |
