About CENGN

Mission and Vision

CENGN is an organization funded by the NCE (Networks of Centres of Excellence) CECR Program (Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research) and the Government of Ontario‘s NGNP (Next Generation Network Program). CENGN works with small and medium-sized businesses, multinationals, the government, and academia to strengthen Canada’s leadership in Next Generation Networking (NGN). This Centre of Excellence strives to create an ecosystem that accelerates the growth of the Canadian Information and Communications Technology sector.

CENGN is a consortium of its member organizations, including: Bell Canada, Cisco, EXFO, Huawei, Invest Ottawa, Juniper Networks, Mitel, Nokia, Ribbon Communications, Rogers, TELUS, and Wind River. These competing organizations come together, putting aside their rivalry, and instead cooperate in CENGN’s vision to support commercialization in Canada – we call this: co-opetition. The goal of CENGN is to strategically fill the gaps identified in the Canadian telecommunications commercialization ecosystem – to ensure that Canadian small and medium enterprises (SMEs), start-ups and researchers have access to industry guidance/knowledge and a multi-vendor open-platform for validation of their technologies and services.

This support is critical to SMEs looking to migrate innovation from the research phase to commercialization.
No single consortium partner can deliver the functionality of CENGN. The strength and uniqueness of our approach comes from a combined contribution of CENGN’s talented team and its members, who contribute their expertise and equipment to lower the barrier to entry for Canadian SMEs.

Members & Partners Board of Directors AGM Directory

Testimonials

Chris Bachalo, CTO, Juniper Networks Canada

CENGN will create the opportunity to build relationships with partners, customers and developers in an environment that supports the commercialization of Software Defined Networking (SDN) applications/ platforms and interoperability between vendors bringing considerable benefits to the Canadian ICT industry through the commercialization of new technologies and application platforms.

Edward Shim, Managing Director, Studio 1 Labs

We previously had no solution to test the high number of physical devices of our product. CENGN’s next generation commercial-grade infrastructure allowed testing for robustness of our IoT sensor devices and continuous 24/7 monitoring during our 3-week project.

Sam Bucci, Vice-President & General Manager of the Terrestrial Optics Product Unit, Nokia

CENGN will provide a much needed cluster of commercialization expertise to SMEs and researchers. This initiative is critical to ensuring that Canada is once again recognized as a leader in next generation intelligent networks. The opportunity to be a member of CENGN will provide Alcatel-Lucent Canada an opportunity to expand our innovation capabilities.

Ketan Kaushish, Co-Founder and CEO, Ukko Agro

Completing a project at CENGN meant we had access to their Testbed, subject matter expertise, and connections. We were able to work with CENGN and their partner eleven-x to ensure our product was ready for upcoming rollouts.

Paul Archard, Founder and CTO, VirTool Networks

Scale testing our cloud network analyzer at CENGN has provided us with an excellent set of results we can use when talking to our prospective customers.

Mathieu Lemay, CEO, Inocybe Technologies

Canada’s fate in the knowledge-based era rests on the nation’s ability to continuously improve its communications infrastructure and talent pool. CENGN is creating an ecosystem with the necessary knowledge to leapfrog Canada into a world leadership role in Next Generation Networks.

Sylvain Charbonneau, Associate Vice-President Research, University of Ottawa

CENGN will facilitate new opportunities for our institution to build new relationships with major corporations and start-ups-relationships that will lead to increased technology transfer and accelerated levels of commercialization.

Stephen Finn, COO, NOCLAND

Given a customer cloud environment based on OpenStack, CENGN’s infrastructure validated that our product can be deployed and operated in an NFV ecosystem. With this new information we can continue to build and monitor the underlying systems for current and future telco customers.

Ibrahim Gedeon, Chief Technology Officer, Telus

There is a burgeoning opportunity for the industry in Software Defined Networking (SDN), a major trend towards development of sophisticated software that links applications to underlying network infrastructure…building capacity in this area will benefit Canadian industry with global market potential.

Code Cubitt, Managing Director, Mistral Venture Partners

CENGN is a unique opportunity for entrepreneurs to evaluate and validate their solutions on real world network hardware in partnership with Tier 1 equipment vendors and network operators- relationships that can be priceless for a start-up trying to get market acceptance. CENGN will result in significant competitive advantage for Canadian companies in the communications sector by facilitating quick & strong channels to market. CENGN will improve the quality of opportunities for investors such as Mistral.

Germain Lamonde, Chairman, Founder and CEO, EXFO Inc.

CENGN will help EXFO build relationships with partners, SMEs and customers that in turn will provide us with the success that will help us continue to build high value jobs in Canadian cities.

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