SoftLayer Technologies, a leading global provider of cloud infrastructure, today announced the expansion of its Catalyst Program into Canada, supporting marquee Canadian incubators, accelerators and startups. SoftLayer’s Catalyst Program will provide Canada’s most promising startups with IT infrastructure (servers, storage and networking) credits, executive mentoring, engineering resources as well as limited financial support.

The Catalyst Program has established relationships with leading Canadian accelerators and incubators including GrowLab, Communitech, Ryerson University Digital Media Zone (DMZ), Innovation Factory and Extreme Startups as well as those affiliated with the Ontario Network of Excellence (ONE). The program in just a few short months has already signed-up several promising Canadian startups including Relay, TickZO, Terminal-0, Garden Connections, DudePins, Matygo and Zumbl.

“SoftLayer’s Catalyst Program is designed to give Canadian entrepreneurs, innovators, inventors, startups, and small-medium businesses the IT resources and expertise they need to successfully develop and launch their ideas,” said Iain Klugman, CEO of Communitech. “By working together we can get some of these companies off the ground and generating revenue, which will create jobs and growth.”

These Canadian startups can take advantage of generous IT credits on the SoftLayer platform for one full year, and get executive mentorship and valuable insights into how to build and scale the next killer application or game. They join the hundreds of US companies – from independents to graduates of top tier accelerators including TechStars and Y Combinator – who all enjoy the benefits of SoftLayer's Catalyst Program.

“The level of startup activity in Canada matches or exceeds any place I’ve been to recently including Austin, Boston, New York or even Silicon Valley,” said George Karidis, chief strategy officer for SoftLayer. “We are looking to enroll these startups as part of our Catalyst Program. SoftLayer wants to become the de facto cloud platform for startups in Canada and across the world. And as a Canadian myself, I’d love to help dozens of companies in Canada get to the world stage.”

“Canadian tech savvy entrepreneurs can now leverage SoftLayer’s Catalyst Program to build and globally scale their mobile, social and interactive applications with the best IT resources and expertise,” said Andy Yang, managing director for Extreme Startups. “Through this program entrepreneurs can offset their costs, minimize risks and receive the wise advice from the perspective of someone who was once in their shoes.”

The Catalyst Program is actively signing up new Canadian startups and the response has been overwhelming. The Catalyst team is in active discussions with top tier accelerators and incubators in Ottawa and Montreal, and will be expanding formally into those areas in early 2013. To learn more about SoftLayer Catalyst visit www.softlayer.com/catalyst.

About SoftLayer Technologies

Headquartered in Dallas, SoftLayer operates a global cloud infrastructure platform built for Internet scale. Spanning 13 data centers in the United States, Asia and Europe and a global footprint of network points of presence, SoftLayer’s modular architecture provides unparalleled performance and control, with a full-featured API and sophisticated automation controlling a flexible platform that seamlessly spans physical and virtual devices, and a global network for secure, low-latency communications. With 100,000 servers under management, SoftLayer is the largest privately held infrastructure-as-a-service provider in the world with a portfolio of leading-edge customers from Web startups to global enterprises. For more information, please visit softlayer.com or call 1.866.398.7638.