Intelligent Design |
Smart Technologies is starting to look like the breakout company that Alberta’s high-tech sector so desperately needs
By Derek Sankey
Just a few months ago, it was a giant hole in the ground and a massive pile of dirt in University Research Park, just north of the University of Calgary. But for Smart Technologies Inc. co-founder Nancy Knowlton, the site will become more than the company’s new headquarters by the time the office building is completed next July.
The new building will be the springboard from which the company will aggressively forge the next phase of its global ambitions with its interactive whiteboard technologies, bringing together the majority of its 1,000 employees under one roof for the first time in the company’s history. This is one Calgary technology company that’s going places.
“When we started Smart 21 years ago, tech was really just a little interesting curiosity here,” says Knowlton, now the company’s CEO. How times have changed. Smart, a new entrant to the Next 100 list this year, finds itself leading the coming-of-age of Alberta’s advanced technology sector.
David Martin, the other co-founder and Knowlton’s husband of about as many years as Smart is old, was recently asked by Premier Ed Stelmach to lead a task force looking at ways to grow Alberta’s technology and value-added industries. The task force, brought together last winter, reported back to the government this spring. “It’s part of ongoing discussions about how to continue to develop a more diversified economy and really how we keep our prosperity engine rolling through the years,” says Knowlton. That report will be released later this year.But for Smart, it’s one of many milestones the company reached recently. In January, the company announced it had passed $1 billion in cumulative sales over its history. And it’s just getting started. “We’ll hit our second billion much more quickly,” Knowlton says. In fact, she estimates the privately held company will reach that $2-billion mark in cumulative sales in about two years. “We have scaled up very dramatically,” she says. “We clearly have a view that we want to grow to annual sales of over $1 billion over the longer term.”
Since the company’s workforce surpassed 1,000 employees last spring, and with the addition of a global head office in Calgary, that goal seems attainable. Most of its employees will work in the Calgary office in research and development, although there are about 80 in the United States and several scattered around the world in sales and administrative roles in Bonn, Tokyo and Shanghai in addition to staff at its assembly plant in Ontario. Construction was completed this year on a 260,000-square-foot assembly and warehousing facility in Ottawa to accommodate future growth.
Considering the fact that only 2% of Smart’s annual revenues come from the Canadian market, the company is a global player at the very front of the pack when it comes to its technology, which includes a wide range of interactive
whiteboards, or Smart Boards, that are used in classrooms and boardrooms around the world.
“Smart has had the foresight to be ahead of everybody else in the game to sell a product that will fundamentally change the way we use computers,” says Dr. Saul Greenberg, a computer science professor and industrial chair of interactive technology at the University of Calgary. “Smart is well ahead of the curve.” He’s known Knowlton and Martin for more than a decade and is a specialist in “human-computer interaction,” or how to make technology fit people rather than the traditional paradigm of making people adapt to the technology. Greenberg says Smart is leading a revolution of sorts.
“I cannot for a moment believe that in 10, 15 or 20 years that we will not have interactive computers and services throughout our workplaces, our homes and other places,” he says. Smart’s technology, which enables users to touch and interact directly with the whiteboards in a collaborative setting, is at the front of this trend in computing. The company was well ahead of its time – perhaps too far ahead – when it was formed, according to John Masters, president and CEO of Calgary Technologies Inc., a not-for-profit agency that helps city companies commercialize their ideas.
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