Canadian Tire Opens New Cloud Nine Digital Innovation Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba

TORONTO, Ont.–Canadian Tire Corporation has officially opened its Cloud Nine Digital Innovation Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The 28,000 square foot site will house a digital content warehouse, application lab, testing lab and high performance data centre. It will serve as the core digital hub for the Canadian Tire Family of Companies and allow the Company to provide greater digital services to its customers, suppliers, employees and partners.

The new centre will provide the Company – which includes Canadian Tire retail stores, Mark’s, FGL Sports (Sport Chek, Hockey Experts, Sports Experts, National Sports, Intersport, Pro Hockey Life and Atmosphere), Partsource, Gas+ and Financial Services – with 20-times more computing power and 10-times more network bandwidth than its existing technology infrastructure. The new facility will also be used to host its new ‘App Factory,’ where advanced digital solutions and new technologies will be developed for use in-store and online.

“At Canadian Tire, we’ve been serving Canadians for over 90 years and innovation has always been a hallmark of our history,” said Eugene Roman, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Canadian Tire Corporation. “The launch of the Cloud Nine Digital Innovation Centre is one of the biggest digital endeavours 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.”

Attached to the Cloud Nine Digital Innovation centre is an Advanced Gamification space and Digital Media Hub called the NEWcleus. The goal of the NEWcleus is to create technology to change the way people communicate and interact with the Company’s retail stores.

“By bringing together a diverse group of individuals in a truly inspiring space, we will continue to showcase innovation at Canadian Tire. As retail turns into e-tail, we will continue to connect our physical stores with digital and further enhance the way our customers interact with our staff, our stores and our brand,” said Roman in a release.

Canadian Tire selected Winnipeg because of the city’s burgeoning technology community, which is the result of significant government investments in the sector from the Province of Manitoba and the City of Winnipeg.

“Manitoba continues to grow with the creation of good jobs in new industries. Nowhere is this more evident than the investments we’re seeing in downtown Winnipeg,” said Manitoba Premier Greg Selinger. “We are pleased to support Canadian Tire’s Cloud Nine Digital Innovation Centre and look forward to seeing even more jobs created as a result of our incentives for new media and data processing businesses.”