ot…
dot… dot… the simple sound of the morse code signal for the
letter ‘S’ gave birth to the worldwide electronic communications
revolution on a windswept hill in Newfoundland and Labrador just over
100 years ago.
It was a cold December day in 1901 when 27-year-old Guglielmo Marconi
hoisted his kite-born aerial on Signal Hill above St. John’s and
received the first trans-Atlantic radio signal, broadcast 1,800 miles
away in Cornwall.
Today, companies in St. John’s are still stretching out beyond
its shores at the forefront of communications. Aliant
Telecom was created by the merger of three telecoms firms, including
Newfoundland Telephone, to form Atlantic Canada’s largest publicly-traded
company.
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According to Aliant’s
vice-president of communications and public affairs Harry Connors,
the pre-merger companies would all have gone out of business by 1997
if they hadn’t joined forces. “We had a three-year window,
so we developed a strategy that would see us investing in telecoms-related
business. Newfoundland and Labrador was a restricted marketplace, so
we had to move outside,” says Mr Connors.
The two main arms of this strategy are Stratos – a world leader
in remote telecoms technology – and xwave, a systems integration
and software engineering company that helps businesses to provide their
services over the internet. The two companies account for about 20 per
cent of Aliant’s overall revenues.
| Online audience: helping businesses provide their services over the internet |
Stratos
does 95 per cent of its business outside Canada and has offices as far
afield as Aberdeen and Sydney. Even so, one-third of its staff are based
in Newfoundland and Labrador. Most of its back-office operations are
based there, benefiting from competitive wages, labour laws and low
overheads.
Much of Stratos’s international business has resulted from its
specialisation in supplying advanced communications for oil fields in
remote and inhospitable places.
The company provides telecoms and IT services to about 40 per cent of
the world’s offshore market.
The company completed its acquisition of British Telecom’s air,
nautical and maritime satellite group for £186.4 million in January
2001, making it one of the top-three distributors for satellite communications
operator Inmarsat in the world. Its clients include the BBC and the
US Navy.
Vice-president of planning and growth, Leigh Puddester, says: “We started small, with £19.4 million revenue. Today, revenues exceed £193.4 million. We want to make sure we continue to be one of the leading providers, or the ultimate provider in the world.”
In
1999 xwave was created with the merger of two Newfoundland and Labrador-based
companies and two from other provinces. Now in its fourth year of business,
xwave has acquired another dozen companies and expanded from 800 employees
to 3,000, spread around the world, from Dallas to Dublin.
Company vice-president for the Newfoundland and Labrador region, Keith
Collins, says: “Ireland is our European beachhead. It is a good
market by itself, but we are looking at it as a launchpad into other
parts of Europe. The UK makes sense before we start looking at France
and the Netherlands. We want to move at a sensible pace so that we do
not overreach ourselves,” he says.
In
Newfoundland and Labrador, xwave has supplied online technology to Memorial
University so that the administrative departments, faculty and students
can manage all aspects of a pupil’s academic career via the internet.
It has also participated in many of the Canadian military’s initiatives
in the areas of electronic warfare, simulation, training, and command
and control systems.
“Our fundamental belief is that we can bring to our clients not
just knowledge of technology, but knowledge of their industry. The combination
should enable us to build more compelling solutions for them,”
says Mr Collins.
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