Canada’s 10 Most Interesting Software Stocks

April 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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Play the word association game with the phrase Canadian software and some are immediately reminded of the days when Corel’s WordPerfect looked like it was set to be the Pepsi to Microsoft’s Coke. While those days have gone the way of the leg warmer (what they’re back?), Canadian software companies have more than stepped up to fill the void. From Enterprise Resource Planning, to The Cloud, to SAAS, name any hot trend in software and there is a Canadian company that is making its mark globally. In this issue we talk to the some of the minds behind Canada’s 10 Most Interesting Software Stocks.

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Canada’s 10 Most Interesting Software Stocks; Part 1

April 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Canadian software has come a long way since Michael Cowpland's Corel was its dominant player.

Play the word association game with the phrase Canadian Software and some are immediately reminded of the days when Corel’s WordPerfect looked like it was going to be the Pepsi to Microsoft’s Coke. While those days have gone the way of the leg warmer (what they’re back?), Canadian software companies have more than stepped up [...]

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Don’t Blame the Cloud

April 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Murphy: "The majority of the companies that were paralyzed by the Amazon downtime were those with no business continuity plans in place or which had chosen not pay additional fees for back-up, or parallel systems, in the cloud."

In the early morning hours of April 21, 2011, Amazon began experiencing networking problems with one of its East Coast servers. By the time New Yorkers were having their breakfast, these problems had ballooned into a full blown disaster for dozens of Amazon’s enterprise customers that depend on the internet giant for hosting and cloud [...]

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Canada’s 10 Most Interesting Software Stocks; Part 2

April 29, 2011 By 1 Comment
Almost, but not quite. Art Mesher saved Descartes Systems from the scrapheap of dot-bomb deals like Pets.com

6. Descartes Systems (TSX:DSG) To the casual observer, Descartes Systems, at one time, looked ready to join pets.com and GovWorks on the scrapheap of dot-bombs. Shares of the Waterloo based company soared to $130 a share early in 2000 before crashing to just over a dollar a few years later. Art Mesher, who was an [...]

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Cantech Letter interviews John Shackleton of OpenText

April 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment
John Shackleton and Open Text management ring the bell at the NASDAQ on January 24, 2011. The event marked the Waterloo company's fifteenth anniversary of going public.

Notice that the title of Chief Information Officer seems to be popping up more often now? Get use to it. Throughout the world more companies are looking to monetize their intellectual assets. Many of them are turning to OpenText (TSX:OTC), the Waterloo based company that has become a worldwide leader in Enterprise Content management. Open [...]

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Cantech Letter interviews Doug Buchanan of Vendtek Systems

April 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Ventek's Buchanan: "Our company’s main strength is our ability to adapt ourselves to suit local market requirements."

In 1988, four robotics students at Vancouver’s BC Institute of Technology settled on a class project. The result, a lottery ticket vending machine that would, ultimately, become Vendtek Systems (TSXV:VSI), a software company that ballooned to over $121 million in revenue in fiscal 2010. Today, Vendtek’s e-Fresh software uses point-of-sale terminals to sell prepaid banking [...]

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Cantech Letter interviews Randy Keith of Serenic

April 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Serenic's Keith: "...the long term value of transparency and efficiency continues to encourage many NFPs and NGOs to implement better financial software systems such as ours."

A little digging into the business of Edmonton’s Serenic Corp. (TSXV:SER) reveals some interesting economic trends. Serenic, which makes software that helps international non-profits and NGO’s better manage their resources, appeared poised to benefit from a shift that many hadn’t noticed. As The New York Times reported at the time, the number of charities in [...]

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Cantech Letter interviews Peter Brereton of TECSYS

April 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Brereton: "We have always been preoccupied with the needs of the user; the purchasing clerk, the sales person, the receiving clerk or the picker on the warehouse floor.."

Ever since the first raw material was delivered to the first customer mankind has muddled through supply chains. The use of supply chain management systems has become a way for smaller manufacturers to gain an advantage over competitors, but has become an absolute necessity for multinationals looking to stay competitive. A window into the supply [...]

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Cantech Letter catches up with David Lucatch of Intertainment Media

April 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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With its shares climbing from pennies to a recent high of $2.25, Intertainment Media (TSXV:INT) has been the runaway success story of the TSX Venture Exchange so far this year. Intertainment has been rising on the promise of Ortsbo, software that translates, in real time, more than fifty different languages across a dozen social media [...]

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BlackBerry security: the white elephant issue that could trample Apple

April 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Lazaridis "We don't have a security problem...this is a national security issue."

When Research in Motion (TSX:RIM) co-CEO Mike Lazaridis, after being pressed on BlackBerry security issues in India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, walked out on BBC reporter Rory Cellan-Jones last week, the reaction from the tech press fell along familiar lines. For some, the Waterloo tech giant is a dinosaur and its products [...]

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