OpenText investing $2B in 1,200 new cloud computing jobs in Ontario, Canada

Enterprise information management leader OpenText said today that it would be doubling its workforce in Ontario, Canada by hiring 1,200 new employees. That’s an investment of up to $2 billion, the company said, and it comes with a government inducement, as the government of Ontario gave the company a one-time grant of $120 million.

“We are an Ontario-grown global company,” CEO Mark Barrenechea said in a statement. “And we chose to invest here because of the highly educated workforce, our strong university partnerships in R&D, as well as the province’s robust and innovative startup communities.”

Above: A view of downtown Toronto from the CN Tower

Image Credit: John Koetsier

It’s the second major investment story in the Canadian province in the last number of months, as Cisco announced in December of 2013 that it was pouring $4 billion into its Ontario operations.

Ontario now ranks second in North America — behind California and ahead of Texas — in ICT companies, provincial representatives told me.

OpenText, which was spun off from the University of Waterloo in 1991, currently employs 8,000 employees across the world, and has over 100,000 customers. With the new investment, the company will bring the number of its Ontario-based employees up to 2,400.

The company’s birthplace, Waterloo, is a well-known entrepreneurial hotbed.

The small city of 100,000 or so had more than 500 startups in 2012, and, alongside the much-larger Toronto, occupies a place on the top 20 tech hubs on the planet list compiled by the Startup Genome. Google has a satellite office there, as do many other prominent Silicon Valley companies. Part of the reason is that Ontario produces about 30,000 CompSci and engineering graduates every year, about 50 percent more than California, which has three times its population.

The new OpenText jobs will focus on research and development in cloud computing, OpenText said, as well as marketing, HR, and other business tasks.

OpenText offers enterprise-level solutions in content management, business process management, customer experience management, data security and transfer, and business data visualization.