It’s been almost a year since Borealis joined Irth. A lot has happened since then, and now is a good time to talk about where Borealis stands, what has changed, what hasn’t, and, most importantly, where we’re going.
What joining Irth has meant for Borealis
Today, organizations in more than 60 countries use Borealis, and that number keeps growing. Our clients run some of the largest energy, mining, utility, transportation, and renewables programs in the world, and increasingly, government agencies and organizations well outside those original sectors, too.
There was a natural fit between Borealis and Irth from the beginning. Irth has spent decades helping organizations protect critical infrastructure and manage risk around their assets. Borealis brings another critical dimension to that work: the people, communities, and stakeholders affected by those assets and the projects around them.
It means more investment behind the platform you already use and the same commitment to the tools we build for stakeholder engagement. I now lead Stakeholder and Land Management at Irth, which includes Borealis software, and I’m still working with the same team. We have a broader roadmap now, and more capability to act on it, with investment specifically earmarked to accelerate Borealis’s growth, expand functionality, and deepen capabilities like Land Management, an area our clients keep asking us to build out further.
Borealis continues to be developed and supported from Canada. Our Quebec office, where Borealis was founded, remains the development hub for the product and continues to serve our Canadian customers directly. At the same time, Borealis is now part of a broader family of Irth products serving many of the same critical infrastructure operators we already work with.
Built with the people who set the standard
The quality of a stakeholder engagement platform comes down to one thing: who’s in the room shaping it.
Borealis has always been shaped by the organizations, operators, and regulators doing complex stakeholder engagement work around the world, as well as by the standards and frameworks that guide that work, including the IFC Performance Standards, AA1000, ISO 26000, GDPR, and IRMA. Our clients are the ones running consultations that get scrutinized by lenders, regulators, and courts, and when they tell us what’s missing or what would make their work easier, that goes straight into the product.
That’s what “worldwide best practice” means to us. Not a claim on a page, but a working relationship with the people doing this at the highest level, in every region we operate. That’s the approach we’ve taken since day one, and it’s the one we’ll keep for years to come.
Privacy standards, wherever you operate
Where we’re headed
Twenty years ago, Borealis started with a small team in Quebec and a clear idea: better projects begin with better relationships with the people and communities they affect. Today, we have that same approach, but with more resources behind us, a growing global customer community, and an ambitious roadmap for what comes next.
That roadmap starts with AI-driven capabilities that make it faster to surface the right stakeholder at the right time, flag emerging risk earlier, and turn engagement data into decisions your team can act on. Alongside that, we’re investing in deeper integration between Borealis and Irth’s existing platforms for damage prevention and asset integrity, so the stakeholder and land data you already collect can inform how you manage risk and protect assets, instead of sitting in a system your team has to check on the side.
Nearly a year into this next chapter, I’m excited about where we’re headed. Borealis has the same commitment to our customers and the same principles that have guided us for 20 years, now with more resources and opportunities to build on them.
And as always, if you have questions about Borealis, what’s changing, or where we’re going next, I welcome the conversation. Feel free to reach out to me directly.
