By Sam Borsato - @BorsatoSam on Twitter

Whipcord offering quality IT services to help grow local business

Jan 18, 2017 | 2:20 PM

LETHBRIDGE – What started out as a one-man information technology solutions company right here in Lethbridge is now flourishing on the national stage.
 
According to Mike Stechyshyn, director of business development, Whipcord aims to “make IT easy” for small and medium-sized businesses by either housing equipment and/or providing reliable cloud servers where staff can run everything for their clients. It’s been operating in Lethbridge since 2015, and boasts a tier three data centre with four-petabytes of capacity, which is the largest of its kind south of Calgary.
 
Stechyshyn says Lethbridge was an obvious choice for the centre. “This is where the founders were from , and they’re passionate about Lethbridge… From a data centre point of view, Lethbridge is perfectly located. It’s very low risk for natural and man made hazards. We’re also extremely well located for network connectivity and power infrastructure.”
 
He says while Whipcord is a small company, it continues to be highly innovative and first in its market, a record that Stechyshyn is most proud of.
 
Trevor Lewington, Economic Development Lethbridge CEO, explained that IT services like this are becoming increasingly important infrastructure for companies to be able to grow and expand.
 
“If you think about the growth of information technology… Data centres like this one are really becoming core infrastructure for cities,” he noted. “Some people get hung up on lack of job numbers, but our research tells us that for every job created in the IT sector, there’s almost five jobs created in other sectors, as a result of that.”
 
Lewington added that the information and communications technologies (ICT) sector is still relatively small in Lethbridge, but is the fastest growing. He stated that most sectors will grow by about two-per cent every year, while ICT expands by upwards of four-per cent annually.
 
“When those servers are in a different country, there’s some challenges legally in terms of who owns that information. So, the great thing that local entrepreneurs, local companies can be assured is that they have, in their own community, access to the data, that it’s being taken care of by a reputable firm and that they have legal protection based on Canadian legislation,” he explained, when asked why local data centres are the best option.
 
Fifteen Whipcord employees across Canada now provide services to several hundred clients.