CANARIE LAUNCHES DAIR, A $3M PILOT PROGRAM TO HELP CANADIAN HIGH-TECH FIRMS
INNOVATE AND ACCELERATE COMMERCIALIZATION

Creation of a ready-made research and development environment to help Canada's tech sector move quickly from inspiration to production

OTTAWA, Dec. 14 /CNW/ - Canada's Advanced Research and Innovation Network (CANARIE) today announced it is launching DAIR - Digital Accelerator for Innovation and Research, a research and development environment where Canadian firms can develop, test and demonstrate innovative information and communications technology (ICT) products, services and protocols.

CANARIE's DAIR Program will help small- and medium-sized ICT companies create new, complex, large-scale products, and demonstrate them to customers, without building a costly R & D infrastructure themselves. ICT researchers investigating next-generation Internet technologies will also benefit.

DAIR is slated to be operational in March 2011, initially as a pilot program that leverages CANARIE's advanced research and education fibre-optic network, while continuing to support the research and education communities.

"CANARIE's DAIR Program builds on the Government of Canada's investment in CANARIE and touches on a key element of our digital economy," said the Honourable Tony Clement, Minister of Industry. "This pilot program leverages that investment to help Canadian businesses be more innovative and more commercially successful in the global marketplace."

"Canada's ICT sector has underperformed compared to its global peers," said Jim Roche, President and CEO of CANARIE. "CANARIE will leverage our network to stimulate the ICT sector and contribute to Canada's digital economy. Researchers and innovators will have the opportunity to move Canada's best ideas quickly from the research lab to the factory floor. Based on successful results of this pilot, we expect that the DAIR Program will form part of CANARIE's next mandate, to support all aspects of the ICT sector."

"This R & D environment will accelerate our product development and testing cycles, as well as provide the testing facilities for the infrastructure platforms that we expect to be the centerpieces of the next wave of the digital economy," said Michael Schmalz, President of Digital Extremes, a leading developer of videogame experiences based in London, Ontario. "It will be of great benefit to our company and companies like ours."

Other countries already provide advanced test environments to enable collaborative and exploratory research and pre-commercial testing. In the U.S., the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) provides a comparable environment. In the European Union, this environment is provided by such initiatives as Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) and Pan-European Laboratory Infrastructure Implementation (PII).

"CANARIE's DAIR Program has the potential to unleash a tsunami of high-tech applications," said Bernard Courtois, President and CEO of the Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC). "It is a tremendous resource for smaller ICT companies who have limited financial resources but unlimited technical creativity and market insight."

Features of CANARIE's DAIR Program, which will run on a dedicated portion of the CANARIE network, include:

• "cloud-based" computing where shared resources are provided on demand
• on-demand provisioning
• instant scalability
• wireless and virtual private network (VPN) access.

About CANARIE:

CANARIE Inc. is Canada's Advanced Research and Innovation Network. Established in 1993, CANARIE manages an ultra high-speed network which facilitates leading-edge research and big science across Canada and around the world. More than 40,000 researchers at over 225 Canadian universities and colleges use the CANARIE Network, as well as researchers at institutes, hospitals, and government laboratories throughout the country. Together with 12 provincial and territorial advanced network partners, CANARIE enables researchers to share and analyze massive amounts of data, like climate models, satellite images, and DNA sequences that can lead to groundbreaking scientific discoveries. CANARIE is a non-profit corporation supported by membership fees, with the major investment in its programs and activities provided by the Government of Canada.

CANARIE keeps Canada at the forefront of digital research and innovation, fundamental to a vibrant digital economy. For additional information, please visit: www.canarie.ca.

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For further information:

Kathryn Anthonisen
Director of Communications
CANARIE
[phone]
[email protected]