We MUST Celebrate Our ICT Successes

Warren Roy, Global Relay

Warren Roy, Global Relay

When Warren Roy took to the stage at the recent ITAC Ingenious Awards the audience was bewitched. Industry veterans and start-up CEO’s alike were transfixed by the profoundly gracious way the youthful founder and CEO of Global Relay detailed his company story from its unlikely beginnings with non-tech friends, its challenges with financiers and its current success as one of North America’s fastest growing cloud archiving and eDiscovery service.

With 325 employees in five offices, he was not afraid to preach the value of the road less travelled and he earned a sustained round of applause when he urged the people in the room to believe in themselves and the power of technology to change touch lives.

It was a defining moment in the ceremony and it underscored one of the key reasons we put on the awards gala in the first place: to celebrate the transformative power of ever-evolving ICT tools and to show how using them in strategic and innovative ways can strengthen the economy, improve productivity and enhance the lives of Canadians.

This year’s award recipients are an exceptional example of how excellence in ICT can touch people’s lives. By making flying easier, information storage safer, stock trading faster, ER visits more manageable and organ donation simpler, the winners are impacting the way people work, access services, and communicate.

There were other interesting stories among the finalists who failed to make the podium but are nonetheless doing exciting, life-changing, business-altering work across ICT and not ICT sectors.

Clearly we have great stories to tell, but sometimes our modesty or our busy routine stop us from sharing them. We know there are other more “ingenious” ideas out there.
So here is my challenge: Let’s build on Global Relay’s rallying cry for pride in the industry and start telling our success stories loudly and proudly. ITAC is willing to do its part. Instead of opening nominations in May as we have in the past, we will begin collecting nominations for the 2015 Ingenious Awards immediately. I urge you to read the stories of our 2014 winners in the latest issue of Backbone Magazine or on the Ingenious website and then start filling out nominations for projects we can all take pride in.

The nomination form can be found at ingeniousawards.ca. How much easier can I make it?

Karna Gupta
President and CEO
ITAC | Information Technology Association of Canada

This blog appeared in Backbone Online