Burnaby sits between Vancouver and the Tri-Cities and has grown around four town centres: Metrotown, Brentwood, Lougheed and Edmonds. Simon Fraser University’s main campus is on Burnaby Mountain, and BCIT’s largest campus is in the city, so there is a steady flow of technical graduates and a lot of established tech, games and engineering employers.
The city also has a serious industrial side. Business parks across the city hold manufacturing, warehousing and wholesale operations — the kind of businesses that run on purchase orders, inventory counts and production schedules, often tracked in tools that were never designed to talk to each other.
That combination makes Burnaby a good fit for custom software. Many companies here have someone technical in-house who can describe exactly what is wrong with the current process; what they lack is the time to build the fix. A clearly scoped tool, API integration or dashboard, delivered in milestones, tends to suit them better than a large platform rollout.