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Residents of the national capital region are well aware of the dangers of counting on growth from a sector as volatile as high-tech. At their peaks during the late 1990s tech boom, Nortel Networks and JDSU employed 16,000 and 10,000 respectively in the Ottawa area. Just several thousand remain — and most work at Ciena, Ericsson and other telecom equipment firms that acquired units of Nortel out of bankruptcy court.

Ciena, now moving into its own 425,000-square-foot campus on Terry Fox Drive in North Kanata, employs about 1,600 locally. It’s one of the region’s largest tech employers, along with Nokia and IBM.

Photo by Paul Chiasson / THE CANADIAN PRESS

It’s conceivable Shopify could be Ottawa’s top tech employer several years from now. The telecom equipment industry is relatively mature while Shopify is mining one of the richest veins in the software sector.

Shopify is coming off a year in which revenues grew 90 per cent year-over-year to $389 million (all figures U.S.). More than 375,000 online merchants use Shopify’s software platform to set up websites and process electronic payment systems.

For the moment, the momentum is impressive. The consensus forecast of independent analysts tracked by Reuters is that Shopify’s sales will hit $600 million this year and $819 million in 2018. Paradigm Capital, an investment research firm, predicts Shopify will add more than 100,000 net new online merchants each year for at least the next three years.

Forecasts like these help explain why Shopify’s shares recently topped $90 Cdn on the TSX — up from less than $26 little more than a year ago. This gives Shopify a market value of roughly $8 billion Cdn. To put that in perspective, it’s about half the value reached in the mid-1990s by Newbridge Networks, the telecom networking company founded by Terence Matthews. However, it’s nowhere near the $125 billion U.S. plus market capitalization that briefly attached to optical components superstar JDSU in 2000.

Shopify has some interesting ideas about whom it would like to hire.

“Shopify is composed of highly talented, deeply caring individuals,” the company noted in a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “But at our core, we value people who get shit done, build for the long-term, focus on simple solutions, act like owners and thrive on change.”

You can look for more of these kinds of people in the downtown core in the months to come.

jbagnall@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/JamesBagnall1