Monday, April 14, 2008

How We See It

Telecom's survival story: worthy of reward

It's a well-known management maxim: You get more of what you reward. In telecommunications, one of New England's largest tech employers, that means smallcap IPOs and microcap mergers and acquisitions.

After seven years of economic shakeout, the region's network communications landscape has finally settled: So-called bubble companies have either gone away for good or they've survived, with some going public and even more being acquired. Among those now public, several are growing and prospering: think Akamai, Bladelogic -- even iBasis. And that begs two questions: As those companies mature, which of them, if any, have the potential to become the next Cisco or Motorola or Juniper (or, to put a local spin on it, the next Data General, or Apollo, or Digital, whose people went on to innovate and build some of this region's greatest success stories)? On the innovation side, where will the next startups emerge -- mobile media? Wireless infrastructure? Network security? As the Massachusetts Network Communications Council hands out its annual awards on April 16, its companies will cross the stage, and all are noteworthy for their ability to survive and to thrive -- for growing the New England telecom jobs base. Looking ahead, however, we think it's worth asking: What does the next wave look like? And given the public policies now in place, which are focused almost exclusively on the life sciences and clean energy sectors, what, exactly, should we be rewarding?