February 12, 2019
Adastra’s Robert Turner (VP Analytics & Cloud) and Ray Modad (Director of Sales, US Adastra) were interviewed by Crain’s Detroit Press to discuss Adastra’s recent expansion into Detroit. Read below to learn about the exciting growth we plan to bring to Detroit.
-Expansion will create 20 jobs in Detroit
-Adastra is targeting a third-quarter move-in date
-Company has a “long history” serving automotive and manufacturing clients
Adastra Corp., a global data management and analytics company based in Markham, Ontario, is taking its talents south of the border with plans to open its first U.S. office in Detroit.
The expansion will create 20 jobs and the company is targeting a third-quarter move-in date, according to Rob Turner, vice president at Adastra North America.
“Detroit is really a city that is on the rebound, and not just rebounding from an automotive and manufacturing perspective, but it’s becoming a strong technology hub around manufacturing and other industries,” Turner said.
Adastra hopes to leverage the innovation that’s occurring in Detroit, as well as the talent pool that’s building there around data and analytics, Turner said.
The location also allows the company to serve other markets in close proximity such as Chicago, Boston and New York City, according to Ray Modad, Detroit native and director of sales at Adastra US, who is tasked with building leads and opening doors for new business opportunities, among other duties. The company also announced the launch of a new downtown Toronto office that will house an “innovation hub” for product development and demonstration, according to a news release.
“We really see Detroit as the Adastra Midwest hub where we’re able to get people from Toronto to leverage their technical expertise and then also for us to be able to easily connect to these neighbouring Midwest and East Coast cities,” he said.
Ideally, the company wants the new office to be located in downtown Detroit, but for now, the company is using shared space at WeWork on Woodward Ave, Turner said.
“We have a strong partnership with Microsoft here in Canada and we are building on that Canadian partnership to establish a partnership with Microsoft folks in the Midwest and so … geographically, we want to be close to their office that’s on Woodward,” he said.
Founded in 2000, the company has a long history catering to automotive and manufacturing clients including Volkswagen, Daimler, Magna International, Audi, and others. Magna is the only Detroit client Adastra has at the moment, but the company is in “business development mode” and plans to generate news leads by leveraging relationships with its clients in other parts of the world, according to Turner.
It generated $200 million in revenue last year, but Turner could not immediately provide revenue projections for 2019.
Some of the company’s services include organizational strategy, establishing target state architectures, building data pipelines, as well as implementing business intelligence and visualization solutions.
Two of the fastest growing parts of Adastra are centred around data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning, along with cloud strategies and migrating data and analytics solutions to the cloud.
