This Big Firm Is Opening A New Office At Queen’s Marque
HALIFAX – A well-known Maritime tech company is making a significant expansion in Halifax.
Mariner Innovations is a technology company with a long history in the Maritimes, particularly New Brunswick. The firm was founded in 2003 by Gerry Pond and Curtis Howe and has grown to about 350 people over the last two decades.
The company provides IT and advisory services and has investments in several enterprise products in related fields.
Paul Eisner is Mariner’s president. He explains that there is a lot of work happening right now in the digital transformation space. Fields like healthcare and the service industry are seeing mass retirements and looking to modernize their service delivery to keep up.
Mariner specializes in “change management” and digital transformation so it’s well-positioned to take advantage of these trends. That, Eisner says, it’s a big part of what’s driving the company’s growth.
Over the next few years, that growth will be concentrated in Halifax, although not exclusively.
“Many people think of Mariner as a New Brunswick-first company, and originally we were in New Brunswick, but we really are at an organization that looks at ourselves as an Atlantic Canadian company,” Eisner says.
Mariner’s expansion in Halifax will be helped along by wage subsidies from the provincial government.
Nova Scotia Business Inc. says Mariner’s could create as many as 60 new jobs in the city over five years. If that happens, an agreement between Mariner and NSBI would see the province give Mariner as much as $990,000 in rebates.
NSBI says the 60 new jobs Mariner creates represent about $1,959,000 in tax revenue, from both income and sales taxes.
Although the agreement between Mariner and NSBI will cover as many as 60 new jobs, Eisner claims the company will hire even more people in Nova Scotia over that time.
Four years ago, Mariner had about 10 people in Nova Scotia. Today, it has about 60.
“We’re going to more than double in Halifax,” Eisner says.
Mariner has clients around the world, but Eisner says the company still hires almost all its team from within the Maritimes. He says the region is a good base for serving international clients because of its location and talent pool.
“There are lots of people here that are really good at this type of work,” he says. “It’s an excellent education system, both at the college level and the university level, and there are retraining opportunities as well.”
Eisner says the company’s choice to open its new Halifax office in the newly completed Queen’s Marque, on the city’s waterfront, was mostly about the flexibility the space provided – both for employees and clients.
“We want to bring people in and we need the space to be flexible; we want to bring customers and it’s an attractive place,” he says. “We think it’s a perfect space for us. It’s a great location.”
Trevor Nichols is Huddle’s editor, based in Halifax. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].