Heading North - Adventures on the Silicon Tundra
by Lee Goldberg
This week, I'll be abandoning the temperate climate of New Jersey and heading North to the suburbs of Ottawa, Canada on one of my occasional technology pilgrimages. Besides being a fun town to visit, Ottawa, or more correctly, its suburb, Kanata, houses a lively collection of high-tech firms, mostly involved with networking and communications. A few days spent with the engineers at the established firms and startups that dot the industrial parks and strip malls of Kanata offers a refreshing contrast to the strange inbred culture of California's Silicon Valley, and helps me re-calibrate my view of the electronics industry.
While smaller, newer, and a bit less dynamic (or should I say manic?), than the electronics of say, San José, Kanata's Silicon Tundra shares many common attributes with its California cousin. Even in these somewhat more subdued times, both areas pulse with the entrepreneurial energy that fueled the 1990s, and support a culture that allows new companies to flash into existence in response to new market opportunities. They also both suffer to some degree from the same unplanned suburban sprawl that occurs in boom towns. Hopefully, better planning and Canada's more intelligent social priorities will prevent Kanata from turning into the overpriced, over-congested nightmare that is as much a part of Silicon Valley as the technology it produces.
Despite these similarities, Kanata's tech belt has somewhat different origins, which may explain the fact that while both regions are incubators for many aggressive startups, they have a very different look and feel - besides the obvious 50 degree difference in average temperatures! For one thing, San José's silicon expertise derives mainly from Sun, Intel, Zilog, and other computer-oriented firms that developed IP-oriented networking technologies. The result is a culture of incredible dynamism, but great uncertainty. Novelty is valued over elegance or the ability to work with existing technologies, and the best-effort nature of IP seems to infect the silicon makers who routinely sample beta chips that "mostly work", or implement complex features of questionable value.
On the other hand, Kanata's technology heritage can be traced back to Nortel, Mitel (its semiconductor operation is now Zarlink), and other telecom-oriented firms. It seems to me that Kanata's culture tends to produce products that, while perhaps a tad less aggressively architected than those coming out of San José, they tend to have more emphasis on reliability, interoperability, and to be designed with more consideration towards system architecture. Oh, I forgot to mention that the other thing I like is that most of the product announcements I get from Kanata turn into working products. It's even not unheard of for a company to not make its announcement until its alpha silicon is in-hand and verified to work.
The slower, more conservative culture in Ottawa probably looked quaint and out of place during the late stages of the 90's tech boom, where vaporware, inflated IPOs and acquisitions were the order of the day; but now that reality has returned to the market after a long sabbatical, it looks like they had the right idea all along.
Of course, none of this has protected Kanata against the trouble that's spread itself in abundance throughout our industry. Layoffs at Mitel/Zarlink, Nortel, Newbridge, JDS Uniphase, and countless smaller firms have hit the technical community hard, and we've seen some of them disappear. I think, however, that the more focused and pragmatic nature of the products that most of these companies make will put them in a good position to take advantage of the recovery. Zarlink's expertise in SONET/SDH, ATM, and derived-voice networks should mean that it does a brisk business in upgrades to existing infrastructure until the current capital expense drought subsides. Likewise, the solid RF solutions from SiGe, the memory, search engine, and classification technologies from SiberCore and Mosaid, and the bus, I/O, and system glue components from companies like Tundra are all part of established markets that are beginning to show at least some signs of life.
But where will this long-awaited recovery begin in earnest, and what industry segments will miss out on it? Likewise, where are the emerging areas for future growth, and has the Kanata tech belt focused itself to take advantage of them? The answers are precisely why I'm headed North. I'll be spending a couple of days talking firsthand with most of the networking and communications companies in the area to get some perspective on where the markets and technologies are headed.
Over the course of the next year, I'll be making the rounds at some of the other non-Californian silicon outposts, in Austin, Boston, Dallas, Seattle/Portland, and Vancouver/Burnaby to take a look at the future from several different perspectives. And you can count on reading about those adventures right here in the pages of analogZONE.
But for now, I'm just looking forward to sampling the technologies, taking in a few sights and sharing a few of the great meals that one of the most livable cities in North America has to offer. Ottawa's unique combination of high-tech culture, more relaxed pace of life (at least compared to San José), and down-to-earth sensibilities about quality of life give me more than enough reason to brave the Arctic conditions that the area experiences for about half the year. For those of you who have not been there I've compiled a short list of reasons you should consider a visit.
Lee's top 10 reasons you have to love the Ottawa/Kanata tech belt
10) Despite residents' complaints to the contrary, the traffic situation in Kanata is manageable. The delays on the freeways at rush hour are comparable to the traffic loads in Santa Clara - at 2 AM!
9) The area's telecom culture means there is less Fad-Tech going on. While there is lots of state-of-the-art stuff going on it's much more about what works instead of simply what's new. You'll see reliability and interoperability as primary design drivers in most chips and boxes coming from this part of the world.
8) Even in the high-tech sector, Canadian employees are assumed to have lives and families outside their jobs, and usually have workloads and hours to match.
7) An engineer or other professional can actually afford to buy a house within reasonable commuting distance of the job.
6) Moving between different electronics firms on my tours often involves a stroll over a parking lot.
5) You can actually talk to the engineers at most Kanata-based companies. While I have nothing against marketing types, they are no substitute for the folks who actually design the products when you need the nuts-and-bolts information to evaluate a product or technology in depth. This makes visits much more productive and interesting than the highly-structured and controlled encounters with suits that pass for interviews in most parts of the country.
4) Ottawa is the only North American city where you can commute to work by skating on the extensive canal system that runs through the area.
3) Winters are long up there - while this may seem like disadvantage at first, it's made the folks very creative about entertaining themselves. More important, I've never been to a place in North America that knows how to enjoy warm weather better. The city turns into one big expanse of open-air cafés, concerts, and festivals as soon as the last snowflake leaves the ground!
2) Ottawa is on the Quebec border, which means that you only have to drive across town to the neighboring town of Hull for some of the best French cuisine outside of Europe.
1) You can actually believe most of what you hear in a press briefing. I don't know if the culture, climate, or economy is responsible for it, but the Vaporware Index on most Ottawa-based companies is several notches below that of Silly Valley. This makes my job much easier, and much more fun.
Questions? Comments? Suggestions for cool little startups or great restaurants
to visit in the greater Ottawa area? Write me at: lgoldberg@green-electronics.com.