In 1981 Joseph Alsop had a vision of creating technology that took the complexity out of developing software applications.

So he and three colleagues set up shop in an old dentist’s office in Billerica, having no idea that this vision would become a middleware company called Progress Software Corp., worth $309 million by the end of 2003.

Progress has been profitable every one of the past 18 years, rounding out 2003 with a profit of $27.1 million, while many other software companies floundered. To date, Progress products are used by more than 60,000 organizations across 120 countries, including 80 percent of Fortune 100 companies and 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

“There were moments in the early days where I just shook my head and said, ‘Why in the world am I doing this?’” said Alsop, chief executive officer and co-founder of Progress.

Moments like the time he and his colleagues were using a garden hose to siphon water off the office roof to stop a leak that had already ruined the company’s one PC, or the time Wall Street was asking why Progress wasn’t experiencing the 100 percent-plus growth that other companies were in the late ’90s.

“We didn’t have the huge growth numbers in the ’90s that other companies had, and people were giving Joe a hard time telling him he was too conservative,” said Candace Clemens, who was hired by Alsop in 1997 to handle analyst relations. “But we still showed steady growth of 25 percent, and when the bubble burst, ours didn’t.”

Alsop is often looked upon as a father figure by employees, and yes, he does take a conservative, if not somewhat of a perfectionist, approach to running a business. Fifteen software engineers check each and every product news release for errors before it is released. Insiders call this the review process from hell, but he does have a humorous if not mischievous side that he hides from the public eye, Clemens said.

That side goes back to his days at a New England prep school where he wired and bugged the headmaster’s office.

When asked why, Alsop replies, “It was so bloody boring there.” “But you have to admit it showed that he was technically savvy at an age when other boys would have just flooded the toilets,” Clemens said.

He was caught and kicked out but ended up at another prep school with students more of his ilk and eventually went on to earn a degree in electrical engineering from MIT.

Over the years, Alsop has diversified the Progress product portfolio through acquisitions, such as the most recent acquisition of caching vendor Persistence Software. But the smartest move made by Alsop was the decision to break up the company into different operating companies as well as his decision to partner aggressively and support independent software vendors (ISVs).

Today Progress works with more than 2,000 ISVs that develop applications on Progress’ platform. These partners generate $5 billion in revenue annually from Progress-based applications and related services.

“That move was sheer brilliance because the ISVs are so diversified,” Clemens said. “One would be developing an application for cafeterias, another for construction and so on. Since (the ISVs’) offerings are so diversified, if one part of the market goes down, we have other areas to fall back on, and we don’t go down.”

He is also willing to take risks, such as Progress’ move into the application service provider (ASP) space, a space Alsop still supports while others have shelved the idea.

Progress’ ASP business is small but growing, doubling in revenue last year with more than 300 partners working with the vendor to web-enable their applications.

“I very much believe that the idea of renting applications over the Internet versus buying and installing hardware and software will become a bigger and bigger part of everyone’s business,” Alsop said.

Others are not so bullish, but Alsop isn’t your typical executive or founder of a software company. It is rare for a founder to remain with a company as long as Alsop has.

Alsop attributes his decision to stay with Progress to the ever-changing nature of the business.

“I’ve never wanted to be anywhere else than in the software business,” Alsop said. “It’s always changing. It’s intellectually fascinating and challenging to be in a business where you’re trying to simplify things in a sea of ever-increasing complexity.”

Looking ahead at this ever-changing landscape, Alsop predicts a resurgence in business-to-business software and in application integration, an area in which its subsidiary Sonic Software is heavily involved.

As for advice to fledgling entrepreneurs, do not be afraid to take a risk, he said.

“Some decisions we made at times we had no way of knowing if it would work or not,” Alsop said. “It turned out we made enough good ones, but some failed. That’s the great thing about our society is that you can fail and people will tolerate failure and then you move on.”

Ralph Folz could star in “Survivor: Internet Bubble.”

The president, CEO and founder of Molecular Inc., a Watertown-based Internet consultancy, started his company in 1994. Ten years later, Molecular qualifies as a graybeard among Internet companies.

His company may be relatively old, but Folz at 35 maintains the youthful mien of a member of the Internet generation, shaved head and goatee included.

His path to CEO-ship started after he earned his undergraduate degree in computer science from Syracuse. Folz went to work for GTE in 1990, lasting two years in the big-company environment before he made the leap to a startup, SciVision, which specialized in scientific visualization and finite element analysis, Folz said.

“I felt a little bit constrained by the big company,” Folz said of his two years at GTE. “It was great, interesting work, but in a big company you can be a shining star and still be between X and Y structures. In a small company, you can work hard and see the instantaneous results of your hard work.”

While at SciVision, Folz attended Boston University at night to earn his master’s in economics. There he met Tom Little, who would become a co-founder of Tvisions, the company that eight years later would become Molecular.

“Tom and I were doing interesting research at BU on distance learning and video on demand in 1993-94,” he said. “We were creating our own software on top of the Internet to deliver distance learning.”

Folz and Little figured that the web, with its standards-based framework, was a great way to get their products to customers.

“So here we go. We started this company,” he said.

Folz said there were a few companies in Greater Boston that wanted to experiment with the web in 1994. Fortunately for Molecular, one of them was Fidelity Investments.

“We landed Fidelity as a client and launched their first web site in 1995. It had a college calculator on it — you know, calculating how much to save now for college in the future. That was the bleeding edge.”

Not a bad first customer. Horizon House, Analog Devices and Avid Technologies soon followed. The customers came in waves, he said. As did the company’s growth.

Key to survival, said Folz, and one of the reasons he’s been named an All-Star, was the measured approach to growth, fund-raising and the open-book approach to financials. It wasn’t that Molecular grew slowly. Like lots of bubble companies, Molecular scaled up quickly when the demand dictated.

But unlike many of its peers, Molecular never had all its eggs in the dot-com basket.

“We had the Fidelities and Analog Devices of the world,” Folz said. “Some of our competitors had 100 percent dot-coms. We had a measured approach to business. We grew more conservatively than the firms that were adding 1,000 employees a quarter.”

The caution included a contrarian strategy for financials as well. While many startups attracted millions in venture money, Molecular bootstrapped on revenue for the early years before finally taking a $20 million A-round investment from CMGI in 2000. Restructuring has flushed all that VC money out of the company, he said.

Folz has also always had an open-books policy with the company’s numbers. Strategic planning sessions involving randomly chosen employees are held every six months.

“We share all the financials, how we’re doing, how exactly we did, with all the employees. We show them the same stats every month.”

Those stats paint a bullish picture, Folz said, with 25 percent revenue growth expected for 2003-2004.

“We don’t sell ourselves as implementers. In 1994 and ’95 we were implementers. We were IT-focused engineers, and we knew how to build things. Today we think of ourselves as a knowledge business. We’re truly a consulting firm.”

Folz credits the Cambridge Business Development Center’s CEO groups with giving him guidance from peers early on. “To this day I’m still in a different CEO group,” he said. “There’s incredible value to going to a group where there’s trust, you can share some challenges and learn in a safe environment.”

Outside of work, Folz says his family comes first. He’s married to Colleen, and they have two children, Jack, 2½, and Ashley, 6 months. He cites also a palette of interests that include sports — a Long Island guy, he’s a converted Mets fan rooting for the Red Sox — golf and flying. Folz recently earned his pilot’s license at Hanscom Field.

One of Mark Galvin’s first jobs in college was as a doorman (though his true job description looked more like that of a bouncer) for Carly Simon’s nightclub on Martha’s Vineyard.

“I just walked in and asked for the job,” Galvin said. “When you’re 6′2″ and 240 pounds, they say, ‘Good doorman.’”

Five dollars an hour was pretty good scratch, Galvin said, but he soon discovered he could make a lot more cash in the tech industry. He had developed some of the skills he needed at McGill University in Montreal, where, though he originally entered to pursue a B.S. in psychology, he took an interest in computers.

Galvin didn’t just like programming. He was good at it.

So after a summer working at MicroLogic Inc. in Watertown churning out assembly code, they asked him to take work back with him to college. At $15 per hour, it was worth it. And it helped persuade Galvin to switch from psychology to computer science.

More than 20 years and three startups later, Galvin has amassed an impressive record as a technology startup guy.

His first startup, Primary Rate Inc. (PRI), came about while he was working as an independent contractor primarily writing code for Data General, a job so lucrative he used the proceeds to buy his first airplane. Today he has three.

Joe Genovese, a friend he knew from a prior job, suggested that the two of them build a product that they could sell over and over instead of selling hours.

Galvin was, at the time, working on ISDN stack code, so they built a standard ISDN subsystem that they sold on an OEM basis to systems builders.

“We did 130 OEM deals over four and a half years,” Galvin said. “Then the seeds started sprouting and our customers starting selling their products. In 1994 we had trailing 12-month revenues of $5 million.”

PRI caught the attention of California-based Xircom, and in 1995, it waved a substantial check in front of PRI’s board of directors. The final price came to $52 million.

Galvin stayed on for a while as general manager of the ISDN products division. But as Xircom gradually began moving operations from New Hampshire to California and as he started to lose engineers to startups, Galvin decided to fly to California to discuss the situation with his boss.

As a startup guy, Galvin admits that his way of communicating is not always as diplomatic as it sometimes should be.

“I got fired,” Galvin said.

He bought a fancy car with his severance and, not long afterward, got a call from Mike Zak, a general partner at Charles River Ventures. Galvin’s next job: entrepreneur-in-residence at CRV.

Once again, a catalyst for a new startup appeared. Another entrepreneur approached Galvin about starting a company, and the two decided to make a dial-up access router.

But instead of spending a year or so to build the product before hiring a sales and marketing team, Galvin decided to follow the example of NewBridge Networks: Buy a product, get the sales and marketing team running and, once the big product is finished, plug it into a sales force that’s already humming.

That company, RAScom, sold to Excel Switching Corp., which eventually wound up as one of Lucent Technology’s many New England acquisitions.

Galvin didn’t stay long at Lucent. For a startup guy, working inside a company as large as Lucent just wasn’t satisfying.

By chance, at a function for his elementary school-age daughter, he met George Cassis, a longtime Lucent employee whose daughter was a friend of Galvin’s daughter.

“We hit it off,” Galvin said. “I’d never met anyone else at these things who even understood what I did for a living.”

This time, Cassis was the catalyst. Both believed that the distributed softswitch approach to next-generation Class 5 voice switching was deeply flawed. They thought it needed an electrical backplane and an integrated architecture.

“We decided to do a Class 5 switch right,” Galvin said.

Initially they hoped to take over the world. But after looking around for the first market to attack, they came to see cable operators as a good place to start.

In the end, cable became the only market for Derry-based Cedar Point Communications. Today the company has contracts with cable operators such as Philadelphia-based Comcast Corp., St. Louis-based Charter Communications and also with European and South American companies.

Galvin is no longer active in the day-to-day operations of Cedar Point — the company hired Andy Paff as its CEO late last year. So today he’s working on finishing his new house and consulting with startups.

Will he do another startup?

“Probably,” Galvin said. “There’s always been a catalyst.”

James Geshwiler’s association with the CommonAngels started as an internship while he was getting his MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Business.

“Prior to James coming on board, CommonAngels was struggling with its administration,” said Alain Hanover, a founding member of the group and managing director at Navigator Technology Ventures. “We depended on volunteers. It was hard to complete deals in a good time frame; putting together the money for the deals was like herding cats.”

Following Geshwiler’s stint as an intern, Hanover said, it was obvious to the membership that he should come on board full time as the group’s managing director.

“We increased dues to cover his costs,” Hanover said. “After that, the group flourished and thrived because he put together a meticulous process, a checklist for due diligence, and he started regular screening meetings instead of us just self-screening each deal.”

“We wouldn’t be able to service our portfolio companies without his efforts, which are above and beyond,” Hanover continued. “He’s stopped me on the street while I’m jogging in the morning to get me to sign papers for a deal closing. He has incredible tenacity.”

In short, Geshwiler turned a loose group of angels into an institution that’s grown into the largest and most active angel group in New England.

The angel group is emerging as a potentially disruptive force in the venture capital industry

Increasingly, angels are no longer investing solo, but instead joining other angels to form groups. Some, like the CommonAngels, have an established due diligence and investment process, complete with a sidecar fund that invests alongside individuals. Others are essentially little more than a group of friends who meet regularly to talk with entrepreneurs. Others mimic VC firms, while still others fall somewhere in between.

Angels invested $18.1 billion into U.S. companies in 2003, according to the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Venture Research. That’s roughly equal to the $17.8 billion that the venture capital industry invested, according to Ernst & Young and VentureOne.

But while VCs invested 17 percent less money in 2003 than in 2002, angels increased the amount of money they invested by 16 percent.

Nevertheless, the amount of money in any given angel deal is usually much smaller than the amount institutional venture capital firms would invest.

For New England’s angel groups, initial investments usually range from about $250,000 to as high as $2.5 million, if multiple groups invest together, the groups’ directors say. The CommonAngels generally invest about $750,000 in the initial round, Geshwiler said.

But angels see these smaller investments not as a weakness but as an opportunity. Again, according to the UNH Center for Venture Research, there’s not a lot of capital available for companies looking to raise between $2 million to $5 million to fully fund their businesses, and despite some consolidation in the industry, most VC syndicates need to put much more than that to work in any given company.

Geshwiler’s leadership within the angel group movement hasn’t stopped with the CommonAngels. His vision for the angel group movement is much broader than Boston.

In November, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City gave birth to the Angel Capital Association, an outgrowth of three informal national angel group summits that were largely spearheaded by Geshwiler at Common Angels.

Geshwiler is chair and co-founder of the ACA, which now counts about 45 angel groups as members.

“It came out of a selfish desire,” Geshwiler said. “I want these organizations to be the best they could. Why do it all yourself?”

As managing director of the CommonAngels, Geshwiler helped manage what turned out to be the best New England VC deal since the bubble burst , at least from the perspective of its internal rate of return. Sand Video, an Andover-based video silicon startup, raised $8 million from CommonAngels, Navigator Ventures and Baker Capital.

Eighteen months later, California-based Broadcom bought Sand Video for $77.5 million. The internal rate of return clocked in at about 150 percent. It was a deal on which many, many Hub venture capital firms took a pass.

The CommonAngels, along with Navigator, carried the company at a crucial time in its life before it nailed down Baker as the third investor, said Sand co-founder, Don Shulsinger.

“We hadn’t yet raised financing,” Shulsinger said, “but we needed to build the prototype for a big meeting in September. Common Angels and Navigator said, “We believe in you guys and feel comfortable you’ll get financed and we don’t want to miss out on your taking this leadership role to the market.”

“Alain and James put this convertible note together,” Shulsinger continued, “and it made all the difference in the world to the company.”

In the mid-1990s, Michael Goldstein was a successful freelance reporter in New York City, filing stories for publications such as New York magazine and BusinessWeek.

In his spare time, however, Goldstein volunteered in the public schools.

“I saw firsthand how screwed up they were,” Goldstein said. “That’s how I got interested in education reform.”

Goldstein entered the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government to pursue a master’s degree in education policy, and for his thesis he wrote the business plan for the Media and Technology Charter High School. In 1999, the Commonwealth awarded that plan a charter. In September 2000, MATCH welcomed its first students.

As chief executive of MATCH, Goldstein had a plan, but he didn’t pretend to have all the answers. For example, when he set out to hire a principal for MATCH, he hired Bob Flaherty, a retired principal of Framingham High School, to interview the candidates.

“What did I know?” Goldstein said. “I was a 29-year-old grad student.”

The two rejected a lot of sterling resumes because they didn’t pass the gut check, and ultimately they hired someone who hadn’t even inquired about the job.

Flaherty said he knew a fantastic teacher at Framingham High School, a man who worked with kids from high-poverty areas and who really knew how to motivate them to perform.

“Charlie Sposato has been a teacher for more than 30 years,” Goldstein said. “In a high-poverty school where kids are coming from chaotic middle schools, the principal has to set a positive, disciplined tone so that teachers have a chance to succeed.”

Sposato calls parents every day, making sure he reaches each parent at least once a month. It goes a long way toward getting parents to buy into the school, Goldstein said, and accounts for its parent satisfaction rating of 9 on a 10-point scale as measured by an outside surveyor.

MATCH, which is located off of Commonwealth Avenue in downtown Boston, teaches 184 high school students from grades 9-12. Students are admitted by lottery, and most come from a family below or near the poverty line.

Students attend school from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Previously, students got out at 12:30 p.m. on Fridays, but this year students will receive tutoring from recent college graduates instead. During this time, the school’s faculty confers to discuss student progress and work on professional development.

Technology isn’t window dressing; it is used as a teaching tool. The school sports a wireless LAN, for instance, that allows its mobile computer labs to hook up to the Internet.

MATCH’s results are impressive. Two years prior to entering MATCH, students’ MCAS pass rate averaged less than 30 percent. In 2003, 89 percent of MATCH students passed and in 2004, the pass rate was 91 percent.

But MCAS performance isn’t enough for Goldstein and his crew. The mission is for every student to succeed in college.

MATCH is delivering.

Each one of last year’s class of 22 graduating seniors has entered colleges. For two-thirds of these students, they’re the first generation to pursue post-secondary education.

And with college as the goal, the ability to pass the MCAS is just a baseline.

“We require every junior and senior to take an advanced placement class in calculus, biology English or history,” Goldstein said.

In support of these AP efforts, MATCH was one of just two high schools in the country to receive a $580,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

That’s not to say that MATCH doesn’t face challenges. The school isn’t afraid to fail a student who isn’t meeting its standards, which has led many of its students to transfer back to district schools.

Since a “D doesn’t count for us,” Goldstein said, kids who flunk at the MATCH school, “which happens a lot,” often get credit for the class at a public high school.

But anecdotally, at least, these kids who transfer back appear to outperform their peers. MATCH is working with an outside researcher to amass definitive data on how these students do over time.

Thanks to its success, MATCH is beginning to experience the same challenge that many technology startups face: how to grow. Many of MATCH’s backers are venture capitalists and fast-growing companies, so not surprisingly, they’re pushing MATCH to replicate its model in other urban districts.

That’s not an easy task. For one, MATCH is extremely selective in hiring staff — generally young but experienced workaholics. The school has never lost a teacher who made a lateral move to another school, Goldstein said, but once these teachers start raising a family, it’s not unusual for them to take less time-intensive leadership positions in other systems, Goldstein said.

“There’s a sustainability and a cost structure challenge,” Goldstein said.

So before he replicates the model, he’d like to make sure he’s got the model absolutely spot-on right.

But even if Goldstein doesn’t open new schools, his entrepreneurial efforts in education have already dramatically changed the lives of dozens upon dozens of high school students for the better, giving them the support and tools they need to succeed in college, a life achievement that many would never have dreamed possible for themselves.

By any measure, that’s success on a grand scale.

Radha Jalan was far from your ordinary first-time CEO when she took over at ElectroChem Inc.

Sure, she faced the normal challenges that confront a top executive, but she was thrust into the role as a recently widowed mother of two, with no money for college, no business experience and no knowledge of the tech industry. In fact, her company didn’t even have a product — or a specific focus.

But being the CEO at all was never part of the plan.

“When I look back, I think I came here with not a particular ambition. I came here as a wife,” said Jalan, who arrived in the United States with her husband, Vinod, from the University of Calcutta and joined him in the Ph.D. program at the University of Florida. “I went to school, I think, because there wasn’t anything else to do. And I was kind of waiting to see where he would go, where his job would be.”

Vinod Jalan took a job at United Technologies in Connecticut, where his wife finished her Ph.D. in education. He ultimately started his own company, ElectroChem Inc., in 1986. The Woburn company developed a diversified R&D portfolio funded by federal research grants, mostly for electrochemical technology.

“I think he was more focused on scientific research, really more into that than where he wanted to go with the company,” Jalan said. “At least at that time he was always thinking about a product later on, but he was committed to the research.”

But in February 1992, Vinod died of a heart attack, leaving his company, multiple patents and lots of R&D in progress.

Jalan’s chief concern, she said, was her daughters, who were 19 and 15 at the time, and maintaining some sense of status quo in their lives. Running the company, she believed, would give her some flexibility toward that end. The final push came on the day of her husband’s funeral, when she got a job offer in education.

“Since I got the offer, I figured, I am employable,” she said. “It might be hard, but down the road if I need another job these people will vouch for me.”

So she took the CEO plunge hit the ground running, with a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of choices and, she says, nothing to lose. One thing she didn’t have was the confidence of others; of the handful of employees she had, most left within six months. She wasn’t worried.

“If you have a creative approach and a realistic approach, you can move things faster,” she said. “I was not a tech person, I had no credibility in this industry, but because of that I could take chances.”

Believing that the company couldn’t continue to rely indefinitely on government funds, Jalan set out to use some of the patents to steer the company toward self-sufficiency. The first step was focusing on fuel cell stacks and systems, then on products for the fuel cell industry. Fuel cells are electrochemical power generators, essentially very large, continuously running batteries that use natural gas or other fuels to produce hydro-gen and generate electricity through electrochemical reactions while producing low emissions.

The strategy shift included a focus on developing proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells, which operate at relatively low temperatures and are best for automobile use, buildings and small applications.

ElectroChem first developed a fuel cell-powered CD player, which was the first of its kind and which allowed customers to see a working fuel cell in action. By compiling a catalog of products, the company became a provider to other fuel cell companies, then began developing test equipment. On the horizon is ECcell, a consumer market unit for energy storage and backup.

“Most of the industry was big fuel cells, and I decided to go small,” she said. “A 200-kilowatt fuel cell was selling for $600,000. I thought, if we focus on smaller ones, it may cost more, but more people may buy it.”

Moreover, the strategy kept the company’s focus in line with that of NASA, which has long used fuel cells in space flight and has an ongoing relationship with ElectroChem.

Twelve years into Jalan’s tenure at the helm, ElectroChem is supported 100 percent by sales, with two-thirds of that coming from overseas. Jalan has taken the company “from total government dependence to total government independence.”

Her daughters have long since graduated from college, and the three women established in Vinod’s memory the Jalan Fund, which provides a scholarship to be awarded to a female student, if possible a minority student, who may be pursuing higher education in the sciences.

And for all that she’s done, she’s perhaps proudest of her “altruistic goal.”

“Before taking over I had always been an activist. This is a technology that, you can say, nurtures. We are providing an economic upliftment, educational opportunities and not compromising the environment. That’s what ElectroChem is hoping to be able to do as we see fit.”

One of the toughest chores about networking in urban areas such as Boston and Cambridge is finding parking.

In a geographically prodigious state such Maine, it’s bringing together warm bodies.

Joseph Kumiszcza is executive director of the Maine Software Developers Association (MESDA). It is now known as the Maine Software and Information Technology Association because it now welcomes professionals from many disciplines.

Kumiszcza has built the organization from a few dozen members to its current status of 240 corporate members. MESDA recently received a state grant that will enable it to open its first full-time office.

Kumiszcza is looking forward to the grand opening and also to further developing the organization.

“We are looking at office space now,” said Kumiszcza, a Maine native who schooled at the University of Maine.

“The office will give us a sense of permanence, though we will always have members in distant parts of the state that won’t make it to a given meeting or event.”

Many organization members are software professionals or application developers. Yet in recent months the organization has reached out to include tech professionals in hardware, telecommunications and the fledgling life sciences trade.

One of Kumiszcza’s key tasks is keeping members connected. In a state in which primary cities such as Portland and Bangor are more than 100 miles apart, pressing the flesh is not always an option.

Indeed, Kumiszcza is known by some Down East tech professionals as “the human Rolodex.”

ldquo;Members live all over the state,” he said. “We hope to launch a videoconferencing initiative so that we can stay connected without having to travel.”

David Crocker, president of the MESDA board, said, “Joe has been a key individual since being named in 1997.”

“The organization recently received a grant to help develop a cluster of tech-related businesses. That will mean an office and also further growth of technology businesses in Maine.”

MESDA is a voluntary partnership of business and professionals working to build a supportive climate for technology companies. Kumiszcza is the organization’s first salaried director.

Some of his work is focused on securing federal grants with a technology slant. For instance, MESDA is seeking federal money that would train Native Americans in Maine to refurbish computers and other tech hardware.

The organization also has been involved with Maine’s nationally known laptop computer program. Under former Gov. Angus King, every middle-school student received a free laptop computer to be used in a variety of school assignments.

The $30 million program, the first of its kind in the nation, had its share of “fiscal critics” when it launched several years ago. Now it has support from every corner of the state. As a result, state officials are trying to get laptops to high schoolers as well.

Kumiszcza’s career path has followed a road of economic development from his early marketing exploits to his current passion for building the infrastructure needed to support Maine’s technology organizations.

He sits on the Computer Science Advisory Committee at the University of Maine and has served on a number of boards of directors, including the Council of Regional Information Technology Associations, an organization serving more than 22,000 technology-related companies in North America.

Kumiszcza has presented at a number of events, including a recent Maine Businesses for Social Responsibility Conference, and was appointed to the Steering Committee for the Governor’s Blaine House Conference on the Creative Economy.

Kumiszcza has introduced several initiatives to propel Maine’s technology industry. In addition to landing a grant that will result in permanent office space, he will soon be introducing the Maine Brain Gain Campaign to help Maine and Maine businesses keep young talent at home and attract recent graduates “home to Maine.”

Said George Markowsky, an early leader of MESDA and a professor at the University of Maine at Orono, “There is no doubt that Joe was the right person to take MESDA to the next level.”

“The initial group of volunteers worked long and hard to get MESDA to the point where it could support a full-time person who could take develop MESDA further. We were fortunate that we found Joe, who succeeded in making MESDA the well-rounded and vital organization that it is today.”

Contemplating Robert Langer’s achievements is to wonder if the day is longer than 24 hours for this MIT professor, inventor and innovator.

Langer, the Kenneth J. Germeshausen Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at MIT, has written 800 articles and is responsible for more than 500 issued or pending patents. The licenses that have come from his work have resulted in the formation of more than 100 companies.

Langer, a graduate of Cornell University (B.S.,1970) and MIT (Ph.D, 1974), has received more than 120 “major” awards.

Perhaps his most notable recent achievement is the inventor’s “million-dollar double.” In 1998, he won the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize for invention, and in 2002 he received the $500,000 Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the Nobel Prize for engineers.

He sits on the board of more than a half-dozen companies and is in high demand as a consultant and advisor.

One of his commercial successes is the recent approval of technology developed by Sontra Medical Corp., a company he helped start. The Food and Drug Administration approved a drug-delivery device that would permit patients to receive medication through the skin but without the use of needles.

Thus patients ranging from squeamish children to suffering diabetics are now equipped with the hope that they can get their medication without use of a painful injection.

What is behind his success? Here is a partial answer, based on a recent e-mail interview:

What was your biggest influence in becoming a scientist?

“My father was a very significant influence. He was a very kind person who cared a lot about other people, and he also got me interested in science and math.”

“Another person that was a significant mentor is Judah Folkman from Boston’s Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. I did my postdoctoral work with Dr. Folkman. One of the good things about Dr. Folkman was the fact that no matter how difficult something seemed and how impossible other people seemed to think it was, he thought anything was possible.”

“My wife, Laura, has also been tremendously encouraging. She is a scientist herself and has been very supportive.”

What are some of the companies you are active in now, in addition to your work with Sontra?

“Momenta, Microchips, Transform Pharmaceuticals, Boston Life Sciences, Pervasis, Wyeth.”

Is it difficult to work on numerous research projects at the same time and still teach at MIT?

“No, I feel there is a lot of synergy between the projects, and it is exciting. Teaching is also a great experience and I really enjoy working with students.”

Can you reflect on key satisfactions in your career?

“One of the things I’m proudest of is how well my students have done. Over 120 are professors, many have started companies, a number are presidents and CEOs. Also, that we’ve made many inventions that have saved and improved people’s lives.”

Langer recently hosted a sold-out seminar at MIT at which he outlined his “simple” steps to success. They are as follows:

• Develop a flexible platform technology that can be replicated. Langer said many companies use different methods in developing drugs. He suggested identifying and staying with one successful method, so that progress can be duplicated.
• Perfect a product, not a procedure. Many life sciences companies develop platforms or procedures for making products. He suggested that every company should focus on developing a product (i.e. a compound or drug).
• Publish “seminal” papers in top national journals. Langer said that publishing in journals such as Nature and Cell is a way to have ideas reviewed by prominent peers as well as developing visibility. Investors as well as scientists read the top periodicals.
• Create broad patents that will permit scientific latitude. Langer said achieving patents with flexibility allows for the scientific team to take the idea in numerous directions while retaining protection.
• Prove principle through in vivo data. Though acknowledging that many ideas start in academic laboratories, Langer said that proving the principle through human trials is the ultimate proof of principle.

One of his most recent forms of recognition was that Parade magazine named him one of six “heroes whose research may save your life.”

The honor of Mass High Tech All-Star is his most recent, and for the moment it stands chronologically at the top of the list.

From turning around a foundering company to rallying politicians behind an issue or fund-raiser, few people would disagree that Joanna Lau is the dynamo behind every cause she takes on.

So much so that she has gained the attention and friendship of four-star generals and an acknowledgment from former President Bill Clinton, who appointed her to the Army Science Board and the National Women’s Business Council from 1999 to 2001.

“I once walked up to Sen. Ted Kennedy and said ‘I don’t know if you remember me, but I work for Joanna Lau,’ ” said Jim Bender, one of the first executives to work for Lau when she was turning around Bowmar Acton Laboratory from the verge of bankruptcy. “He turned to me and said, ‘Don’t we all?’”

While studying for her MBA, Lau decided to write an assigned case study on Bowmar. “When I walked in there I saw that they were hanging on by their nails,” said Lau, founder and CEO of Lau Technologies of Concord.

But with the same tenacity her mother had when she picked up and left Korea with eight children to move to New York, Lau rolled up her sleeves and began to creatively raise cash to run Bowmar, which at the time was a defense contractor making the “electronic brains” for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

She borrowed against Bowmar’s equipment to raise 85 percent of the cash she needed. She then personally borrowed left and right, but it was when she asked employees if they were interested in a stockholder buyout that the turnaround began, with 24 employees agreeing to invest in the company.

“VC funding was out of the question,” Lau said. “No one was interested in a defense company.”

At the time of the buyout, Bowmar was a $7 million company losing $1 million a year. The year was 1990 and as luck would have it, at least for defense contractors, President George H.W. Bush launched Operation Desert Storm. Bowmar’s electronics for tanks were back in demand, and by 1994 Bowmar was relaunched as a $49 million company called Lau Technologies.

When asked why she would take on such a risky endeavor, Lau said she was looking for a niche. Not many women were in the defense industry, and government defense agencies had constantly been saying they needed to help small businesses.

“Small businesses collectively make up most of the economy, and of course the government wants to support the growth of these companies, so that was the opportunity I saw,” Lau said.

Not to mention the chance to develop innovative technologies such as turret stabilization, target tracking, gun pointing and unmanned flight management systems for the U.S. Army and Air Force.

In 2001, Lau Technologies sold its defense business to Curtiss-Wright for a tidy sum of between $45 million to $60 million including a five year earn-out.

The employees that took a chance on then 30-year-old Lau reaped the rewards of the acquisition, and Lau made sure Curtiss-Wright kept all of her employees in place before she signed the deal.

In fact, the employees and stockholders that remained from Bowmar have enjoyed an average return of 20 times their investments.

Today Lau Technologies is “very profitable” and private, which is how Lau wants the company to stay.

Always looking for new challenges and innovations, Lau decided to take on the emerging facial recognition space, eventually founding and taking public facial recognition vendor Viisage in 1996.

Lau Technologies retains an 18 percent interest in Viisage, a company now worth $70 million, as well as a 10 percent interest in a Korean joint venture, Vision Interactive, a security and biometrics company, and a 50 percent interest in MCR, a weapons and IT company that primarily serves the federal government.

“I always wanted to be a teacher and I’m always looking for other companies to invest in and help them turn around, so I guess I am teaching,” Lau said.

Viisage Technologies’ interest in facial recognition has led to a deal with the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles to digitize drivers’ licenses, and the federal government is considering using the technology for border control.

Lau Technologies has undergone many evolutions from a defense contractor to a facial recognition vendor, to an executive consulting and investment company with expertise in the defense and security industries today.

“I am managing other people’s money, and it’s important to make money for these people ethically and earn it the hard way, and we really earned it considering the challenges we’ve overcome,” Lau said.

As an investor and consulting firm, the company helps build mid-range businesses that primarily contract with the federal government, an area in which Lau’s many connections come into play.

In one case during Operation Desert Storm, the turrets on the tanks were turning when they were not supposed to, putting soldiers’ lives at risk. The printed circuit boards with the electronics designed to control the turrets was not designed by Lau Technologies, but rather than calling the original designer, the U.S. Army Tank Commander called Lau.

The turret flaw had to be fixed by Nov. 2; Lau was contacted in September. Rather than wait for a government contract that would take months to come through, Lau decided to pay for the redesign work and put her team to work.

The team came up with a fix within six weeks, meeting the Nov. 2 deadline.

“She did things like that often because it was the right thing to do,” Bender said. “That’s the way she’s always run her business, doing the right thing. Her company has always been profitable and she’s shared the wealth with dividends to all shareholders time and again.”

Lots of entrepreneurs set out to find the proverbial pot of gold. Ihor Lys helped create the rainbow.

Lys is chief technology officer at Color Kinetics Inc., a Boston-Based pioneer in the development and design of light-emitting diode (LED)-based illumination. Lys, who co-founded the company in 1997 with fellow Carnegie Mellon University graduate George Mueller, was instrumental in developing the company’s flagship Chromacore technology, on which all of its products are based.

Chromacore uses a layer of digital intelligence to control LEDs and generate millions of colors in a multitude of displays. And if you’ve ever left your house, you’ve probably seen Color Kinetics’ spectacular multicolored handiwork somewhere.

Close to home, there’s Boston’s 33 Restaurant & Lounge and Symphony Hall, Jordan’s Furniture in Natick, the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, and the Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods casinos in Connecticut; further out there’s the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, the Culver City, Calif., set of Wheel of Fortune and the Cathay Financial Dome in Taiwan. And there are dozens more.

“The applications are mostly commercial, mostly centered on hospitality and civic kinds of things,” Lys said. “Hotel ballrooms, building facades, theaters, that kind of stuff.”

The show started in the mid-1990s, when Lys and Mueller, who had been “tinkering” with LEDs to create displays, visited the Lighting Dimensions International trade show.

“George and I saw that nebulous progress was being made with LEDs,” Lys said. “It seemed that people were going through a lot of effort to produce just a little bit of color.”

The pair saw the lighting industry and LEDs overlapping, Mueller said, and foresaw a dramatic shift in the way the industry would work in the future.

“We had decided at some point that we should do this colored lighting thing,” Lys said. They developed some prototypes and returned to LDI, winning best new product at the 1997 show. “There was a heavy theatrical element,” to the demonstration, he said.

Each of the co-founders had entrepreneurial experience: Mueller had founded Internet Securities Inc. with his brother Gary in 1994, and Lys was the founder of ILYS Software. ILYS was conceived not as a profit-making venture but rather to develop software for the mass spectrometry industry, Lys said. Nevertheless, its Tofware product became “the gold standard” for the business before the modern spectrometer.

Color Kinetics launched with Lys as CTO and Mueller as CEO.

“Ihor is the tech guy, absolutely,” Mueller said. “He has been instrumental in the technology, he is a great visionary, and when people meet him they can see that he has such a great grasp of technology and innovation.”

That didn’t mean people would flock to LED illumination, however.

“At that point if you put all of the people who would become our target customers in a room and told them you were going to solve all their problems with LEDs, you’d have been greeted with choruses of laughter and then shown the door,” Lys said.

But the advantages are clear, Lys says. Maintenance for conventional lighting makes LED-type displays impossible; theaters and traditional users of such lighting require “armies” of staff and large, heavy pieces of equipment that cost thousands of dollars.

“The bar down the street isn’t going to do that,” he said. “So it wasn’t hard finding applications for lighting of this sort.”

One boost toward what now seems a ubiquitous LED presence came in the form of Northwest Airlines’ 700-foot-long pedestrian tunnel at Detroit Metro Airport, opened in 2002, though Lys says there were plenty of other projects.

Such marquee displays, increasing luminous output of LEDs and a rapidly declining cost factor have combined to create one hot product. Next up is the much larger white-light market, which includes the type of lights you’re probably reading by right now.

Today, in addition to its lighting-systems line, Color Kinetics operates an OEM and licensing line, including a standard line of modules to be incorporated by other manufacturers, and licenses its technology in and out of the lighting industry. And it manages to stay a few steps ahead, as well.

“We went to almost eight or nine trade shows before we saw any competition at all,” Lys said of the early days. “Our IP stance since then is we don’t compete with anyone in the U.S.; our competition is with traditional lighting.”

“You can think of this as just another building material, like paint or marble, except that it uses electricity and provides lighting.”

George McMillan, this year’s Mass High Tech All Star for Turn-Around executive, had to put the middle-class work ethic learned from his parents to good use when he landed at CMGI.

The once high-flying darling of the late ’90s had come spectacularly crashing to earth. In January 2000, CMGI’s public holdings topped $11 billion and included about 70 different entities. By April 2001, the company’s stock had lost 98 percent of its value. It dropped from $163 per share value in January 2000, to $1.76 on April 12, 2001, and still trades between $1 and $2.

“My mission was to save CMGI,” McMillan, 50, said of his arrival in the spring of 2001. The company had a $100 million per quarter burn rate and $700 million in cash.

He stepped down as CEO in August when Joseph Lawler took over. Was he successful?

“The challenge of turning an Internet incubator to a functioning holding company was one of my biggest successes and most challenging things I’ve ever done,” he said.

“I am extremely proud of the transformation of CMGI between mid-2001 and today, and what our team created — Massachusetts’ newest billion dollar technology company,” he said. “CMGI is a focused operating company, global, profitable, unquestionable market leader in supply chain management to global OEMs, and with cash and liquidity to last my successor a very long time.”

Given that his background had included stints in the mail order plant business and the record club world, that’s saying something.

McMillan’s path to CMGI began in Sacramento, Calif., where he was the son of parents who were “consumed with the idea that their kids would be the first generation of McMillans to go to college,” he said.

Not just any college, mind you. He arrived at Stanford with a desire to be the next Armand Hammer, the iconic businessman who was the head of Occidental Petroleum and unofficial ambassador to the Soviet Union until his death in 1990. That explains McMillan’s status as an economics and history major with a concentration in Russian translation.

His interest in the Russian language pointed him in Harvard’s direction in 1976, and by 1980 he had earned a law degree and MBA in a joint program at Harvard.

“The day I got here with my U-Haul and wandered around Mass. Ave., I knew I was born to be in the east,” he said.

And the day he graduated Harvard, he said he knew he would go into business. At Boston Consulting Group he met two people he cites as key mentors: John Fletcher, now of Fletcher Spaght Ventures, and Pamela Reeve, former CEO of Lightbridge.

He and Fletcher left BCS in 1983, and McMillan in 1984 started an advertising agency, now known as the Internet consulting firm Digitas with Michael Bronner at direct marketing outfit Bronner Slosberg.

From then on followed a string of endeavors, the common theme of which were a turn around or startup: Michigan Bulb Co., sold in 1992; IT shop Renaissance Solutions, sold to The Registry in 1997; CEO of BMG Direct, the record club arm of music and publishing giant Bertlesman.

After four years of commuting from Sudbury to New York City, he was all ears when the CMGI opportunity came about. Plus, it promised to be the mother of all turn-arounds.

“Transition in even an average economy would have been challenging enough,” he said. “The economy turned out to be worse than our worst expectations. I was counting on an average market and it turned out to be horrendous. People were shell-shocked, saying ‘this can’t be done.’”

He spent 2002 triaging the businesses that were there, discovering a “solid, $140 million business” in SalesLink that he could build on. Dismembering the various Internet pieces of business and shedding about $1 billion in real estate and IT commitments, McMillan “tore down one side and then built up the global supply chain management business.” He kept the firm’s venture capital arm going as well.

When CMGI announced in March the acquisition of Modus Media for $230 million in cash and stock, it marked for many the success McMillan was hired to achieve.

He credited his team, especially Tom Oberdorf and Jack Gray, with the success.

Since August, McMillan said he’s spent time with his family, wife Donna and sons Mark, 15 and Michael, 17. Asked what’s next, McMillan said, “I’m very likely to do a pre-IPO company through its IPO in the technology space somewhere between Boston and New York.”

His middle class roots are a contrast to his enormous financial success, and that presents a challenge of its own: instilling in his sons the drive to succeed.

“Keeping them hungry and willing to work hard is the single best thing a man can do for his sons,” he said.

“My parents spent 50 years in a 1,000 square-foot house in Sacramento,” he said. “My dad finished high school and became a mechanic, then worked his way into a desk job as a civilian for the Air Force. My mom went to nursing school. I do not feel like we were shortchanged.”

Jonathan Rosen, a life sciences professional of wide-ranging interests, recently calculated that he and his wife have lived in more than a dozen communities.

He has stopped roaming, however, because he has found a challenging position that offers an interdisciplinary approach to medicine.

Rosen is the director the Office of Technology Implementation for the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT).

The organization mentors medical professionals as they attempt to bring progressive technology to patients. In more direct terms, CIMIT tries to speed good ideas and promising medical devices to the bedside.

CIMIT takes a multidisciplinary approach to medical innovation, which appears to be the factor that has helped Rosen shed the habit of writing checks to moving and storage companies.

“I’ve done many things in my career,” said Rosen, a native of Middleton, N.Y., who has been in the medical field for more than three decades, “including starting a company. I thought I might start another one until I became involved with CIMIT.”

“This position is the most exciting I have ever had. The focus is on the patient, and people from many medical institutions work together to provide better and more innovative care.”

CIMIT, founded five years ago, has fewer than 10 full-time employees, most of whom are on staff at participating institutions.

Those organizations include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT and Partners HealthCare System.

Rosen’s office has coordinated the creation and management of intellectual property, the formation of partnerships with medical device companies, and the translation of CIMIT projects into new standards of patient care.

It offers numerous services, including protection of intellectual property; finding funding for prototype development testing; evaluating safety, efficacy and cost-effectiveness; and developing exit strategies for commercialization.

CIMIT has helped launch projects that focus on disciplines including trauma, tissue engineering and the operating room of the future.

One of its most ambitious projects is one to counter the threat of bioterrorism. Its partner is the International Science and Technology Center in Moscow.

CIMIT also acts as a clearinghouse for promising new ideas. It has supported 162 investigators and 242 projects, which have led to 140 invention disclosures and 70 patent applications, organization officials say.

“Jonathan has vision that is ahead of the curve,” said Mireille Rosenberg, a colleague and an assistant director at CIMIT. “He is committed to what he sees.”

“And he is passionate about bringing useful innovation to the patient, not just introducing innovation for the sake of change.”

Says Gary Tearney, a researcher at Mass General, “Jonathan has been very helpful in supporting our work. We’ve gone from a tiny operation to a lab with almost 30.”

From an initial $6 million investment by Mass General, CIMIT has generated close to $100 million in additional funding from both government and private sources.

“There are great people here doing great things,” Rosen said. “By working together, we are getting a lot done.”

Of his personal background, Rosen recalls he was always interested in science.

“I made gunpowder bombs in the backyard that never blew up, and I watched Mr. Wizard every chance I got,” he said. “It was a foregone conclusion that I would work somewhere in the field.”

He attended the University of Michigan, earning a B.S. and a master’s degree in materials science.

Rosen later earned a master’s degree from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University.

He held key positions at Johnson & Johnson, including chief technical officer for their Codman & Shurtleff Division, and director of advanced technologies for their corporate office of science and technology.

Before joining CIMIT, Rosen participated in founding a series of biomaterials and biomedical device startups in this country and in Europe.

Rosen is a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty and an affiliate member of the Health, Science and Technology faculty. He is currently directing an MIT-Harvard seminar series on medical ethics and professional conduct in research.

Rosen represents CIMIT on the Board of MassMedic, the advisory board of MassIndex, the Science and Technology Caucus and the advisory panel for the New England Health Institute.

On the national level, he is participating in a study of pediatric post-market surveillance for the Institute of Medicine.

“The move to this area has been a great thing,” Rosen said. “My wife and family have found good situations here, and I certainly have.”

“To work with so many talented people on worthwhile medical projects has been a wonderful experience for me.”

Una Ryan was trained as a scientist but in recent months the versatile executive has been functioning like a veteran politician.

She is chair of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council and one of her most pressing duties is to respond to calls for drug reimportation.

“The biotech industry is very important to Massachusetts,” said Ryan, whose day job is CEO of Avant Immunotherapeutics Inc. in Needham. “It provides good jobs, and will help grow the state economy in coming years.”

“It provides well-paying jobs in doing important work. We do not want to deal with federal price controls on our products — or the threat of them.”

Ryan is leading the 400-member MBC as it seeks to make known its opposition to “price controls.”

This term is actually a euphemism for drug importation from Canada or other countries. The practice is not sanctioned by the federal government, but the Food and Drug Administration has not been aggressive in attempting to halt the practice.

Americans in northern states frequently take buses across the border. News reports indicate that thousands more order their medications by mail or the Internet to save money.

Industry reports suggest that medications in Canada can cost 40 to 50 percent less. Americans pay more for most medications than most countries in Europe or Asia.

Ryan’s position is that the biotech and pharmaceutical industries must realize a profit on drugs or venture capitalists will not invest in biotech or pharmaceutical companies.

Such investment is necessary for biotech and pharmas to fund research-and-development costs necessary to bring a drug to market. According the Center for the Study of Drug Development at Tufts University, it costs close to $800 million to bring a drug to market.

“If we are going to have effective drugs in the future, we must continue to invest,” says Ryan.

Ryan speaks frequently on Beacon Hill and Capitol Hill in an effort to blunt the voice of politicians whose constituents are clamoring for less expensive drugs.

It is a formidable challenge but Ryan is no stranger to difficult situations. She was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, “between the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the fall of Singapore.”

Her father was an English rubber tree planter. Her mother was Chinese. When Japan tightened its grip in Malaysia, the family was forced to flee.

“My mother and I got the last boat out of Singapore before the fall,” Ryan once reflected. “My father stayed and was taken by the Japanese.”

“He was interned and tortured for five years. Eventually we were reunited, but since those days I have never taken life for granted.”

Her parents eventually resettled to Malaysia.

Ryan grew up with an aunt in England. She was drawn to biology at an early age and received a Ph.D. in that field from Cambridge University.

A researcher who has contributed particularly to the understanding of the control of blood pressure, Ryan spent her career from 1963 to 1989 in academia.

She became professor of medicine at the University of Miami, where she was also a Howard Hughes Investigator and chief of the division of vascular biology. After joining the Monsanto Co. in 1990, she maintained an academic appointment as research professor of surgery, medicine and cell biology at Washington University School of Medicine.

She joined Avant in 1993. In addition to the executive post, Ryan is currently research professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine.

In connection with her company’s interests, she has represented industry in its efforts to help pass the Public Health Security and the Bioterrorism Response Act of 2002, and was present at the White House signing of that bill by President Bush.

Avant is a biotechnology company engaged in commercialization of products that “harness the human immune system to prevent and treat disease.”

It is developing vaccines against viral and bacterial diseases, including single-dose oral vaccines aimed at protecting travelers from cholera, typhoid fever and other illnesses.

In recent months it has received grants from the Department of Defense to develop vaccines to counter bioweapons. The company is also conducting clinical studies of a proprietary vaccine candidate for cholesterol management.

Ryan recently made news when she hosted a press conference to announce the designation of former House Speaker Thomas Finneran as president of the biotech council.

The choice of Finneran, a veteran politician, solidifies the council’s commitment to the goal of preserving the free-market system as it relates to the pricing of medication.

“The U.S. has the best medical care in the world,” she commented. “If we are going to continue as the leader, we must think of the long-term good.

“It takes a lot of time and a lot of money to develop medications, but in the end they speed recovery and extend lives.”

Mark Shirman wasn’t a storage guy when he founded GlassHouse Technologies Inc., a Framingham-based independent storage consultancy, three years ago.

Some might see his lack of a storage pedigree as a disadvantage. Not Shirman. He credits much of the success of GlassHouse to his having come from outside the industry.

“Storage people are usually all about technology and rugged individualists,” Shirman said. “We’re building teams and saying that it’s not about the technology.”

But while not an expert in storage, Shirman had built his career on consulting.

In 1985, after a couple of years as a consultant with Andersen Consulting, Shirman struck out on his own and started Innovative Information Systems in Norwood, an early client-server consultancy that he built to 700 employees. In 1990, he sold the company to CDI Corp., where he remained for about five more years.

A couple of years after that he went to Cambridge Technology Partners, a Cambridge IT consultancy that’s legendary for spawning talented New England tech CEOs. There he headed up their CRM and e-business group from 1997 to 1999, taking the unit from $50 million in annual revenue to about $300 million.

In 1999, he joined Colorado-based Convergent Group and, as executive vice president of corporate development, played a large role in taking the company public. Two months after its $35 million IPO, energy giant Schlumberger bought Convergent for $276 million as part of its bubble-era effort to build an IT consulting business.

After the merger, Shirman took a few months off to spend with his family — the IPO road show and merger negotiations had kept him away from his wife and children — but it didn’t take long before he started looking for new opportunities.

“I knew services really well, and I swore I’d never do another one,” Shirman said. “It’s tough to scale.”

But when a group of venture capitalist investors asked him to take a look at a storage consultancy roll-up play, he saw a gap in the market that desperately needed to be addressed.

“The anchor company, the one they wanted to buy first and then roll other companies into it, was just a reseller,” Shirman said. “Most of their revenues came from product. I said to myself, where are the storage guys who do what we did at CTP? There wasn’t anyone.”

It was, he said, like the early days of client-server, when consultancies such as CTP and Sapient took off. It seemed the right time to start an independent storage consultancy, one that didn’t resell product but instead sold its expertise in building and managing efficient, business-oriented storage systems.

The trouble was, he wanted to get started quickly, and to do that he needed to persuade VCs to invest.

In mid-2001, he may as well have said he wanted to sell toys online.

VCs were wary of tech services because they’d made massive investments in New England-based Internet services companies that didn’t pay off.

Their fears were well founded. Zefer Inc., for example, raised about $167 million before it sold its assets to NEC Corp. at a bargain price. And those services companies that went public didn’t do much better.

C-Bridge Internet Solutions merged with eXcelon, which Progress Software finally bought for $24 million. Primix Solutions sold its North American operations to a Canadian company for $7 million cash; and Viant was swallowed up by Chicago-based Divine in a $96 million stock swap. Divine itself later went bankrupt.

Plus, it was an audacious strategy for storage because, in the storage industry, manufacturers are heavily dependent on channel sales. By turning its back on reseller agreements, GlassHouse seemed to be giving up a potentially large revenue stream.

But the more refusals he received, the more resolute he became. Finally, he met Bob Divoli, a former entrepreneur and now a managing director at Sigma Partners.

“Bob got it immediately,” Shirman said.

Sigma invested $1.6 million in GlassHouse in the summer of 2001. To date, GlassHouse has raised about $15 million.

Thanks in part to four rapid-fire acquisitions in May and June, GlassHouse, which has about 250 employees, is now the largest independent storage consultancy in the nation.

Shirman isn’t sitting still. He’s in the midst of raising a D round of funding to fuel further growth. Right now, he said he’s mostly competing against internal teams at large companies, but Shirman expects that will change.

“The big guys will get into this,” Shirman said. “That’s why I want to raise more cash. I played a lot of soccer growing up, and I’m extremely paranoid about relishing the last good play because that’s when the ball gets by you.”