Canadian-based Telesat announced it will work with CloudOps of Montreal to build Telesat Lightspeed Cloud.  The cloud consulting and managed services company will deliver a cloud infrastructure that will allow Telesat to deliver services to customers over Telesat’s Lightspeed Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite network, with CloudOps responsible for the design and development of the cloud infrastructure, cloud-native data platforms, and system operations optimized for the Lightspeed network.

CloudOps will build a “highly agile network infrastructure,” according to the press release, enabling the Lightspeed Cloud to dynamically scale as required to meet customer requirements, with applications able to operate seamlessly across Telesat cloud resources and customers’ cloud services, while providing “the most secure, highest quality of service.”

“As the first enterprise-grade LEO network, Telesat Lightspeed requires the advanced, agile cloud and data infrastructure that industry leader CloudOps can provide,” said Erwin Hudson, Vice President of LEO at Telesat. “CloudOps has vast experience and expertise in best-of-breed open source and proprietary technologies and is clearly the right partner to meet our business and technical goals for the Telesat Lightspeed Cloud architecture. ”

The deal with CloudOps is no great surprise, given Telesat’s large economic commitment to Québec and Canada’s robust ecosystem of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies.  Telesat is investing $1.27 billion (USD) into the province, expecting to create 600 skilled jobs.  Telesat will build include a new campus in Québec for Lightspeed, while Lightspeed prime contractor Thales Alenia Space is building a satellite final assembly and manufacturing facility in the province.

Canada is big into IT, with over 667,000 workers in the field and accounting for 4.8% of national GDP, according to a 2019 report by the government.  Major SaaS firms headquartered in Canada include Coveo, Hootsuite, and FreshBooks.