‘Summit’ Aims to Fire Up Quebec City’s Cloud Ecosystem

Nestled along the Saint Lawrence River in the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec, Quebec City is a town as much steeped in tradition as bucolic charm.

To hear the principals at Gestion-bsp tell it, that sense of tradition can sometimes play to the disadvantage of new industries, like IT and cloud services.

That’s why the local technology solutions provider is organizing a “Cloud Summit” on Sept. 21 in an effort to bring together key players and call attention to Quebec City’s cloud services community.

“Canada, in general, is sort of a neglected market for cloud computing,” said Gestion-bsp’s Fabrice Vanegas. “The tradition is so strong that people don’t embrace change.”

“Quebec City, they’re using faxes,” he said. “I think all of Canada is behind but Quebec City is very behind.”

Gestion-bsp is leveraging partnerships with Google and cloud services vendor Zoho.

Both companies have agreed to send representatives to make presentations, Vanegas said.

“We’re sort of bringing something that hasn’t been done here before,” he said.

About 180 people are being invited, including representatives of local businesses, students, the vendor officials and some local VIPs.

Vanegas insists the event is not about landing a few sales, but rather energizing the community around cloud services.

“What I’m hoping to get out of this is creating awareness and to take the cloud computing community and to drag them kicking and screaming into the 21^st Century,” he said.

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