Harry Zarek

Harry Zarek is the President , CEO and founder of Compugen. Harry developed an interest in personal computing while he was finishing his PhD in physics at the University of Toronto. In 1981, he started a business building computers in the garage of his Toronto home and called it Compugen. Under Harry's stewardship, Compugen has achieved growth that has consistently exceeded the industry average. In 2011, the company reported revenues of more than $400 million. Today, the company provides technology infrastructure solutions for medium and large sized corporations and governments. Harry focuses on sales and marketing activities and developing the long-term business strategy to position the company as a trusted business partner to customers and vendors. Harry holds an undergraduate degree in Engineering Science and a PhD in Physics from the University of Toronto. He is an active investor and member of the Board of Directors of a number of early-stage technology companies in Canada and the US. and sits on the board of RuggedCom Inc., a Smart Grid Company that had its IPO on the TSX in the summer of 2007. Harry is interested in a range of topics from vendor relations to IT management and nurturing growth in Canada's IT sphere. Email Harry here.

By Harry Zarek, November 21, 2018

A Millimetre Away From Total Mayhem

Why every organization needs an Incident Response Plan In psychology, the phenomenon is known as illusory correlation. It’s a term that’s used to describe our ability as humans to perceive a relationship between things when no such relationship exists. I’m often reminded of this phenomenon whenever I speak to one of my fellow executives about their preparedness for a potential cyber-attack. I’ll ask them if they have a cyber-attack incident response plan and usually what … Read More …

By Harry Zarek, January 17, 2017

Empower users or protect assets? We shouldn’t have to choose.

Business operates in a digital world where we spend a significant part of our day connected and interacting with people, applications and information both inside and outside our organisation. For our internal IT environment, we manage access to applications and data in a formal way. But when our staff go out to the internet, we can’t restrict where they go. We have an “honour principle” that they will go only to business relevant sites … Read More …

By Harry Zarek, July 03, 2013

Cloud computing services, Datacentre, public cloud, Think On

A new game-changer in the public cloud marketplace

To date, enterprise and mid-enterprise businesses in Canada who want to explore private cloud options have been hampered by slow provisioning times, spotty reliability, and restrictive pricing agreements that lock you into a contract months or years in advance. Last week, ThinkOn introduced the first virtual datacentre in Canada. I think this is going to be a game-changer in the Canadian marketplace. In my opinion, it has a lot of promising features that set it … Read More …

By Harry Zarek, June 04, 2013

IT Channel

“Today, tomorrow, together”: Thoughts on the opening presentation at #ciscops13

4 June 2013, Boston, MA—“Today, tomorrow, together” was the theme of an inspiring message from Cisco’s CEO John Chambers delivered during the opening presentation this morning at the Cisco Partner Summit 2013 in Boston, Mass. According to Chambers, Cisco, today the dominant player in the networking industry, is positioning itself to become the world’s #1 IT company. An audacious goal, but one that the company may well achieve. Here’s why I think they have a … Read More …

By Harry Zarek, February 19, 2013

Dell

If Dell goes private, it will change the PC market

At one time Dell was the leader in the PC marketplace. Their disruptive direct to the consumer and business sales model trumped the traditional PC reseller marketplace. Dell was one of the first vendors to allow customers to self serve and build their own PC configuration on the Internet; their Premier Pages web site allowed corporations to fully procure and self serve. Their direct sell model forced the other OEMs to respond and it led … Read More …

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