Spatium North is a founder-owned company in Montréal. Both of us have spent years running infrastructure in higher education, keeping a running list of the tools we wished someone had already built. SpatiumDDI is the first one off that list.
We have been in IT infrastructure long enough to have a list of tools we want and cannot buy. This is what moved one of them off the list.
Between the two of us: network administration, DNS, DHCP and address management, and the cloud foundation underneath them. The list of things we wished existed is not market research — it is a list we have been adding to for years, from the operator side of the console.
Unified DDI is held by a handful of proprietary vendors: quote-only, metered per address, sealed appliances, and a bill that grows every time your network does. Strip the wrapper and underneath are BIND9, Kea and PowerDNS — the same free engines anyone can already run.
That is the part that actually decided it. Almost every other layer of the stack has a credible open-source option to fall back on; this one had none. A gap that specific, in a category this fundamental, reads less like a market than an invitation.
Two people with day jobs could not have built a platform this size a few years ago. We can now — not because AI writes the product, but because it collapses the distance between a design and a working implementation. For the first time, the tool we pictured is the tool we can actually ship.
We both work in higher-education IT at McGill University, where budgets get stretched thin and getting creative with the resources you have is part of the job description. It is a good education: you learn to take what you are given and get everything possible out of it. On our own teams, we are the ones people come to when a project needs to get off the ground. Here, small is deliberate — every support enquiry reaches someone who wrote part of the product.
Builds the product. A career spent assembling unified internal tooling for university IT — the suites that replace six half-working systems with one that works — pointed squarely at DDI. The one in the lab: most of what ships started as something that had to run on a personal network first.
Built out the Azure cloud foundation and ran the projects that landed on top of it. Owns quality, migrations and the commercial side here — a question about a deployment or a price gets its answer from this desk.
We are incorporated in Canada and operate from Québec. For public-sector and health buyers with data-residency or Canadian-supplier requirements, that is a box you can tick without an exception request.
Montréal is bilingual and so is the company: deal with us in English or French, in writing or on a call. Today French runs through the founder who speaks it fluently, and the next person we hire will speak it too. We would rather tell you exactly what we have than let you picture a bigger language desk than there is.
The product runs on your hardware, in your network. Your zone data never transits our infrastructure, so "where is it hosted" has a simple answer: where you put it.
Canadians have a reputation for landing in the middle — understated, not given to overselling — and we lean into it rather than apologize for it. We will not promise you something we cannot deliver, and when the answer is "not yet" we write that on the website. From the people selling the software your network depends on, that is the trait you actually want.
We are enthusiasts before we are a business. Both of us run the kind of home and lab infrastructure most people only touch at work, and the bar the product has to clear is the one we set for our own systems — because we are still on the list of people who wanted this tool to exist.