Canadian Tire has officially opened its Cloud Nine Digital Innovation Centre in Winnipeg, it was announced Wednesday.
The centre will serve as the core digital hub for Canadian Tire’s family of companies and allow retailers to provide greater digital services to its customers, suppliers, employees and partners. The 28,000 square foot site houses a digital content warehouse, application lab, testing lab and high performance data centre.
The facility will provide the company – which includes Canadian Tire retail stores, Mark’s, FGL Sports, Partsource, Gas+ and Financial Services – with 20-times more computing power and 10-times more network bandwidth than its existing technology infrastructure, and will also host the company’s new “App Factory,” where new technologies will be developed for use in-store and online.
“Innovation has always been a hallmark of our history,” said Eugene Roman, senior vice-president and chief technology officer at Canadian Tire Corporation, in a release. “The launch of the Cloud Nine Digital Innovation Centre is one of the biggest digital endeavors ever taken on by the company – the applications we are developing here will enhance the in-store shopping experiences for our customers, turbo-charge their interaction with our brands online and provide great improvements to our back-end operations.”
Canadian Tire has recently made a number of key investments designed to improve store operations and digitally power customer interactions. In 2013, the company launched an interactive online catalogue and announced that it would begin increasing the number of products available through its e-commerce channels. Last year it moved a team of five employees into digital development lab Communitech in Waterloo, Ont., to experiment with new digital products and experiences for both its online properties and retail locations. Canadian Tire said the new Centre will be closely linked to Communitech.
According to Canadian Tire, Winnipeg was chosen due to the city’s emerging technology community, the result of significant government investments in the sector from the Province of Manitoba and the City of Winnipeg.
