Pierre Y. Ducros
Eng., FCMC, Adm.A.

Former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer DMR Group Inc.

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Pierre Ducros helped build DMR Group Inc. into Canada's largest consulting firm and an international company with more than 30 offices worldwide. As a pioneer of the information technology service industry, he is a 1998 inductee into the Industry Builder Wing of the C.I.P.A. Hall of Fame.

Born in Montreal in 1939, Ducros obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from the UniversitÈ de Paris at CollËge Stanislas in Montreal in 1956. He graduated from the Royal Military College of Canada in 1960 and obtained a Bachelor of Engineering (Communications) degree from McGill University in 1961.

Ducros served as an officer of the Royal Canadian Navy from 1961 to 1964. Between 1964 and 1973 he held a variety of management positions at IBM Canada Limited. Then he and two other IBM branch managers, Serge Meilleur and Alain Roy, did something that no one else in Canada had done before - founded an information management consulting company, Ducros, Meilleur, Roy & Associates Ltd., in Montreal.

"DMR was the first IT service corporation in Canada," Ducros recalls. "We knew about 300 clients, IT managers, by their first names, and we knew exactly what computers they had, what software they had, what problems they were facing.

"The competition at that time were the Big Eight accounting and consulting firms. Because we were so close to the industry, we thought we could solve clients' problems within the week that it would take the competition to write a proposal.

"I remember one client asking us for a proposal and then going on holiday. By the time she returned, not only had we written the proposal but we had solved the problem."

Under Ducros as president and CEO, the company that became DMR Group Inc. established itself as a leader in offering hardware, software and training to suit clients' computer systems needs. DMR was the first Canadian IT firm to have an international presence, with offices in the United States, Europe and Australia. It was the first to create a research and development department and the first to become a public company.

"When we started in 1973 there was no market study made because there was no market," Ducros says. "We did not know if we would be a company of 20 people or 50 people. We never thought that, by the time I retired in June 1996, there would be 5,300 people in DMR."

Today the company employs 8,500 people and has annual revenue of $1.2 billion. It has been a subsidiary of Amdahl Corp. since 1995. Ducros is now president of the Universite du Quebec in Montreal and a member of the Council on National Unity and of Les Grands Ballets. He is also a member of the Conseil nationale des ambassadeurs des cegeps, l'Ordre des ingenieurs du Quebec, the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal. He is a member of the Bureau des gouverneurs du Centre d'entreprises et d'innovation de Montreal. He is a member of the board of Cognos Incorporated, Alliance-Atlantis Communications Inc., MPACT Immedia, SystËmes Purkinje Inc. and LÈvesque Beaubien & Compagnie.

Ducros is a member of the Order of Canada. He is an officer of l'Ordre de la Couronne of Belgium and received the commemorative medal for the 125th anniversary of the confederation of Canada in 1992. He received the CIPS Professional Achievement Award in 1992 and the HEC Revue Commerce Vision sans frontiËre Award in 1993, and was inducted into the Conseil du Patronat's Entrepreneurs Club in 1993.

He is a past chairman of the Information Technology Association of Canada (and managed its merger with the Canadian Association of Data Processing Services); of the Canadian Association of Management Consultants, the Institute of Certified Management Consultants of Canada and the Institute of Certified Management Consultants of Quebec.