Telica

Four years ago, John St. Amand fit the profile of so many telecom entrepreneurs of the late 1990s: a young, tech-savvy manager with an acronym-laden vocabulary who felt limited in his big-company surroundings.

Many of St. Amand's entrepreneurial peers proved to be little more than shooting stars. Meanwhile, St. Amand's Marlboro, Mass.-based Telica has emerged as perhaps the leading next-gen packet switch start-up vendor, boasting a contract with Verizon Communications and an OEM agreement with a soon-to-be-announced global vendor.

Thirty-two-year-old St. Amand's business acumen reflects a wisdom that belies his years and telecom experience, according to Ed Glassmeyer, general partner for Oak Investment Partners, a venture capital firm that has led Telica's last two funding rounds. “This guy has just totally grown as an executive right before our eyes. He really gets it,” Glassmeyer said.

St. Amand does not subscribe to the “shoot-the-moon approach” employed by next-gen start-ups banking on replacing Class 5 switches, Glassmeyer said. St. Amand believes next-gen switches eventually will perform Class 5 functions but does not believe carriers will replace existing boxes.

“Carriers have bought $300 billion worth of equipment, and they're not going to rip it out,” he said. “The New Economy has said you can't throw anything away; it's not good business practice.”

Thanks to some contracting work for Lucent Technologies, Telica was profitable during its first six months of operation. Eventually, investors supported his grand vision: selling switches to Bell companies and large interexchange carriers. Verizon is using Telica's switches only for Internet-offload functions, but St. Amand said breaking into the Bell company's network was crucial for his company — and all next-gen start-ups.

Said St. Amand: “If I were Nortel and Lucent right now, I'd be saying, ‘This is what we were worried about.’”