Osama Arafat, CEO of Toronto-based Q9 Networks, picked up the CVCA’s 16th Annual Entrepreneur of the Year Award at their gala awards event last night at the CVCA's Annual Conference in Calgary.
Established in 1992, the purpose of CVCA’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award competition is to promote, highlight and celebrate the achievements of entrepreneurs who lead private equity or venture-backed Canadian companies.
Arafat's Q9 Networks provides outsourced data centre infrastructure services to approximately 400 customers. Its services include the provision of physical space within highly secure data centres; various managed services including: bandwidth, dedicated servers, firewalls, load balancing, virtual private networking (VPN) and back-up/restore. Q9 employs approximately 150 employees.
JLA Ventures and VenGrowth are both investors in Q9 Networks and have experienced excellent returns.
“Osama’s ability to predict future technology needs of organizations, which he has successfully done three times, makes him an outstanding candidate for this CVCA award,” said John Albright, Partner of JLA Ventures.
“Osama is a serial entrepreneur who also has a strong ability to hire and lead great management teams,” said Mike Cohen, Managing General Partner at VG Partners- part of VenGrowth Private Equity Partners Inc.. “He is also a generous philanthropist and served on the board of Hope Air, a national charity that assists Canadians with medical treatment when they are unable to afford the airfare. I cannot think of a candidate more deserving of this award.”
Congrats to Arafat and Q9 Networks.
With approximately $1 billion in assets under management, VenGrowth is one of Canada's leading venture capital firms. Since it began operations in... [more]
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The CVCA – Canada’s Venture Capital & Private Equity Association – represents the majority of private equity companies in Canada, with over... [more]
Q9 Networks is a leading Canadian provider of outsourced data centre infrastructure for organizations with mission-critical IT operations. Q9's... [more]
Rob Lewis
Rob is the President of Techvibes Media Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of Techvibes.com.
His diverse background includes stints in International Trade Finance, Web Development, and Enterprise Software and he is a graduate of the University of British Columbia, British Columbia Institute of Technology, and Simon Fraser University.
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