ThinDesk customers benefit from the company’s recently acquired distributor pricing status with Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest thin client manufacturer

ThinDesk Inc. offers small and medium-sized businesses secure, cost-effective IT infrastructure – managed computing services and thin client, replacement PCs – that is always on, accessible from anywhere and easy to maintain. ThinDesk supports entire IT environments, from the desktop to the back office, across wide area networks and the Internet, for businesses in health care, financial, educational and business services industries.

Founded in 2006, with an infusion of investment capital from Canadian Investors Corporation, ThinDesk forged a partnership with TELUS Communications Company in 2007. With the partnership, ThinDesk gained a fully scalable, Canada-wide, enterprise-class TELUS data centre infrastructure and skilled personnel. At that time, ThinDesk also changed its platform from an old server base to a new platform based on VMware virtualized Hewlett-Packard (HP) Development Company, L.P. servers.

Today ThinDesk can serve an unlimited number of new customers. The company manages the network between its offices and its customers, and between its customers’ software and the thin clients on the desktops. TELUS manages everything inside the date centres including maintenance and customer updates. With TELUS, ThinDesk delivers an Always On Guarantee© to ensure its clients’ businesses are supported 24/7.

Why Ontario

ThinDesk, a private company headquartered in Markham, Ontario, benefits from close proximity to the large business market in the metro areas within the Ontario Technology Corridor. Ontario is home to the largest SMB market in Canada. ThinDesk serves companies in more than 70 facilities throughout Ontario. As well, ThinDesk has strong partnerships with Ontario-based operations at Hewlett-Packard, Unisys and TELUS – with its $250 Million world class data centre located in Toronto.

Award-winning author of Who’s Your City, University of Toronto Professor Richard Florida has said Toronto has a fresh energy that places it among the globe’s most powerful urban centres with “the ability to attract people from all over the world.” ThinDesk and TELUS employ a full complement of technologists and other staff skilled in a variety of areas of expertise, and so Toronto suits the company. ThinDesk is also pleased to serve the growing businesses found throughout smaller and rural Ontario communities.

Business advantage

ThinDesk’s solution centralizes data in powerful, secure and energy efficient SAS 70 Data Centres and provides access to customers’ applications from anywhere in the world either from their office desktop clients or from any browser-based device with internet access to a company’s secured VPN. ThinDesk solutions can save up to 40% of the annual total cost of ownership of traditional, distributed servers and PC environments.

For Greenferd Construction Inc., ThinDesk’s thin computing solution is expected to deliver a Return On Investment (ROI) in just two years. Greenferd, a construction management firm in the Toronto area, was struggling with an IT setup that hindered productivity of the company’s 22 employees. After implementing ThinDesk technology, Greenferd benefited from:

• A 15% reduction in utility costs
• Avoiding over-inflated costs of a future satellite office
• Closing overly-expensive current offices
• Saving a Controller 8 hours per week – time previously devoted to IT management
• Saving site managers 2,000 hours annually by allowing them secure access to centralized real-time data rather than travel time to offices using distributed servers in need of individual attention
• Eliminating failed data backups, full network shut downs and viruses

Future growth plans

Industry analysts predict Thin Computing solutions are the wave of the future. Gartner Inc. named “green IT” a top strategic technology in 2008. Green IT is one of ThinDesk’s key features. A ThinDesk replacement thin client desktop typically consumes one-tenth the energy of a traditional desktop PC. As well, ThinDesk efficiencies enable branch and remote or mobile offices to lower company costs by reducing overall emissions and energy use as well as eliminating IT maintenance required in the field.

The company’s national partnerships support its growth. ThinDesk secured distributor pricing status from Hewlett-Packard for the benefit of its customers. In 2009, Hewlett-Packard became the world’s largest thin client manufacturer and is pursuing alliances with ThinDesk to expand global product line.

Contact information

ThinDesk Inc.
+1-416-849-1276
www.thindesk.com

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Working on television series and blockbuster films, such as X-Men, Keyframe Digital Productions employs over 30 full-time animators and visual effects artists

With roots in popular console and personal computer video game development, Keyframe Digital Productions Inc. has evolved into a full service digital art, animation and visual effects studio. Focusing less on gaming and more on visual effects and animation, the company is producing original animated television series and providing visual effects and cost saving pre-visualization for blockbuster films.

Founded in 1997 by Clint Green and Darren Cranford and located in picturesque Niagara-on-the-Lake, a community nestled between St. Catharines and Niagara Falls, Ontario, Keyframe’s digital effects and animation work includes original children’s animated series and international movie blockbusters, such as X-Men and Driven.

Why Ontario

Over the last five years nearly every film nominated for a special effects Oscar has used technology development in Ontario. As a result of Ontario’s international special effects reputation, The Computer Animation Studios of Ontario (CASO), a non-profit organization, was founded in 2005 to promote and grow the province’s industry. Brian Simpson, Keyframe Chief Executive Officer, has been a member of the CASO board since December 2007.

The Ontario government provides film and television producers with financial incentives to do business in Ontario. The province has the highest research and development (R&D) tax credits of any G7 country, better than France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. In fact, the combined federal and provincial tax breaks can repay up to CDN $44 for every CDN $100.00 spent in R&D. For example, the Ontario Computer Animation and Special Effects (OCASE) Tax Credit refunds 20% of the labour costs accumulated for computer animation and special effects activities.

Business advantage

Keyframe is the first Canadian company to specialized in pre-visualization, a process that is used to plan a scene before filming commences. Starting as storyboards, the scene is generated by a computer as low-resolution animations. The sets created in this phase are exact replicas of the stage and after these virtual sets are built, rough computer versions of the actors can be created. Through this, a director can begin directing the movie even before decisions on cast and locations are finalized. They can plan backgrounds, evaluate complicated stunts, light sets and test camera movements.

Pre-visualization can also expose potential production problems. “When we were working on X-Men, the production crew was in the process of building a very expensive 40-foot stone wall and a huge bluescreen,” said Cranford. “But by creating the exact camera view - looking out of the jail cell - we realized that most of the wall and the area behind the camera were not visible on camera, so we were able to save the production a huge amount of time and money on the construction of the set.”

In addition to doing pre-visualization work for X-Men, the studio has also worked on Head of State, with Chris Rock, and The Secret Window, starring three-time Academy Award nominee Johnny Depp.

Keyframe recently did visual effects, including wire and rig removal and created computer generated elements such as crowds and police vehicles, for XIII, a NBC Universal Inc. four hour television mini-series starring Stephen Dorff and Val Kilmer. The studio also performed motion tracking, color correction, blur effects and removed unwanted elements, while cloning and adjusting other elements from the original footage to complete the finished sequence.

Future growth plans

Keyframe is working with Kavaleer Productions, based in Dublin, Ireland, to co-develop the animated children’s series Sock Monsters. “We are currently in negotiations with several European children’s networks who are very pleased with the animated samples and love the creative concept,” said Brian Simpson, Chief Executive Officer.

In February 2008 Keyframe announced that it is developing an original children’s animated series, Peggy’s Little Harbour. “We’ll launch Peggy through a Canadian broadcaster, with whom we are in discussions,” said Green, “then roll it out in Europe, the United States and Latin America.”

Keyframe also announced in February 2009 that it was selected to provide visual effects for Warehouse 13, a SCI FI Channel original series. Filming began in March 2009 with an eye to a July premiere.

Contact information

Keyframe Digital Productions Inc.
+1-905-988-6440
www.keyframe.ca

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