A Swedish engineering design home that develops and companies merchandise for purchasers within the automotive, medtech, industrial and telecommunications sectors has acquired DragonWave’s Ottawa operations in a bid to bolster its Kanata workplace.
Syntronic introduced this week it is including about two dozen former DragonWave staff within the Nationwide Capital Area to the Stockholm-based agency’s rising North American operations in Kanata. Phrases of the deal weren’t disclosed.
Syntronic opened its Ottawa workplace eight years in the past. Since then, the corporate has expanded to greater than 420 staff who now work out of three separate areas in Kanata. The most recent is the previous DragonWave workplace at 362 Terry Fox Dr., simply down the highway from Syntronic’s North American headquarters at 340 Terry Fox.
It is the first-ever acquisition for the Swedish agency, which was based in 1983 and has greater than 1,500 staff in eight international locations.
“I believe it says quite a bit about their dedication to Canada and the potential that they see in Canada as a key place for rising R&D companies and restore and after-market companies as effectively,” says Darrell Wellington, Syntronic’s Kanata-based senior vice- president.
“It has been powerful to rent the expertise as a result of lots of people try to do this – which is why this was such a great acquisition for us.”
Whereas Syntronic has employed greater than 100 employees in Ottawa over the previous 18 months, it nonetheless has greater than 150 R&D positions that stay unfilled as the corporate struggles to seek out expert expertise in at the moment’s red-hot tech market.
Bringing DragonWave’s staff into the fold will assist the agency shortly tackle that scarcity, Wellington says.
“It has been powerful to rent the expertise as a result of lots of people try to do this – which is why this was such a great acquisition for us,” he explains.
Syntronic’s acquisition of DragonWave’s Canadian operations cements an already robust connection between the 2 firms.
The Swedish agency has been a longtime provider of services to DragonWave and different enterprises owned by DragonWave’s mother or father firm, Dallas-based COMSovereign. Over time, quite a lot of high-ranking DragonWave staff have moved on to senior positions at Syntronic Canada, together with VP of engineering Ingrid Magazine, who spent 17 years at DragonWave – together with three years as VP of product improvement – earlier than assuming her present position .
“Plenty of our folks through the years have moved to Syntronic they usually appreciated being there and it was type of a pure match for us,” says DragonWave’s Ottawa-based VP of operations Dave Farrar, who initiated the M&A talks between the 2 corporations .
Backhaul merchandise
The deal marks the top of the road for DragonWave in Canada, closing the e book on what was as soon as certainly one of Ottawa’s most distinguished tech corporations.
The corporate that makes a speciality of microwave backhaul merchandise that join cellphone towers to service suppliers’ wi-fi networks was a publicly traded agency with greater than $150 million in annual revenues in 2015.
However its revenues plunged to lower than $40 million inside two years after Nokia – which traditionally supplied a good portion of DragonWave’s income as an unique gear producer gross sales channel – acquired DragonWave competitor Alcatel-Lucent.
The agency was delisted from the Toronto Inventory Alternate in 2017. Later that yr, DragonWave was acquired by Arizona-based Rework-X, which itself was later aborbed by COMSovereign Holding Corp., a developer of superior communications methods that trades on the Nasdaq change .
At the moment, DragonWave’s clients embody Bell, Rogers and Telus, in addition to world telecom suppliers similar to Britain’s Vodafone. Its US operations will stay underneath COMSovereign’s management.
Farrar and Wellington say they count on the 2 firms to proceed to work carefully collectively to construct out DragonWave’s present product line. Wellington additionally sees alternatives to faucet into DragonWave’s experience in manufacturing and repairing present telecom elements, companies that Syntronic at the moment does not present in Canada.
“This helps us try this with an present buyer base, after which we will add a bunch of latest clients in North America with that group being the bottom,” he says.
In the meantime, Syntronic, which opened a design home in Montreal final yr, continues to develop its Canadian operations at a brisk tempo.
The corporate expects to open an workplace within the Better Toronto Space shortly and plans to maintain including to its Kanata footprint, Wellington says, noting that demand for the group’s R&D and design companies has skyrocketed throughout the pandemic.
“Plenty of tech firms, particularly in telecom and even automotive and industrial, have numerous strain to get new merchandise on their roadmaps and in some circumstances their engineering groups may not be performing as effectively as they used to as a result of many individuals are working from residence,” he explains.
“We intend to maintain (hiring) … and even pace it up if we will.”