Huawei Technologies opens Ottawa R&D Centre

Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies has officially unveiled its first R&D centre in Ottawa after quietly establishing operations in the region nearly two years ago. The Shenzhen-based developer of telecom networking equipment plans to grow the Ottawa R&D Centre from 70 today to 250 in two years and make an investment of up to $50 million. The Centre is the second operation Huawei has established in Canada (the first was a sales and marketing office in Markham ON in 2008) and it now has nine R&D centres in North America and 19 globally. There's an irony to Huawei locating in the backyard of the former Nortel Networks Corp, given that the rapidly growing company is equal in size ($30 billion in sales, 95,000-strong workforce) to the former Canadian flagship at its peak. Nearly half of Huawei's current Ottawa workforce is comprised of former Nortel employees. And like Nortel, it is forging alliances with area institutions, having already signed a collaboration agreement with Carleton Univ. The Ottawa R&D Centre will focus on developing application-specific integrated circuit chips as well as technologies for wireline, wireless, optical and Internet protocol networking products….