PORTSMOUTH, N.H. – August 28, 2009 - The University of New Hampshire has been seeding the local networking landscape with young workers for more than 20 years through its InterOperability Laboratory, but the network equipment testing facility has also influenced the launch of a handful of New Hampshire-based technology startups.
Perhaps the apple that fell closest to the technological tree is QA Cafe LLC of Portsmouth, N.H., which makes software that helps cable modem and broadband router makers test those pieces of equipment. But when QA Cafe founder Joe McEachern started working at the UNH-IOL in the mid-’90s, he wasn’t at all focused on the broadband space.
“Like many students (attending) grad school at UNH, I got a job at the IOL, in the ATM consortium, which is no longer in existence. That goes to show you the number of technologies they have supported over the years,” McEachern said.
Dividing members up into consortia is the way the IOL defines which technologies and standards it is testing at any given time, and what companies and organizations are involved. For example, QA Cafe is a member of the DSL Consortium, McEachern said, and some of the other member companies that make up that group include giants such as Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc., as well as Boston’s Zoom Telephonics Inc. and Pannaway Technologies Inc. of Portsmouth.
McEachern was directly inspired by his experiences testing out the new equipment from such companies when it came to deciding what he wanted to focus his startup on.
“I had the opportunity to work on testing gear, and I really enjoyed that angle of it,” he said.
For Will Thibodeau, founder and chief technology officer of Treeno Software Inc., the influence of his years working at the IOL was a little less direct. Treeno is an enterprise content management software company that specializes in high-volume, high-value content, such as for insurance companies or financial institutions. But Thibodeau spent most of his time in the IOL labs working on cable standards.
“I started there at the end of my freshman year, so most of my college years I was working at IOL,” he said. “I was working at the DOCSIS lab, the standard that cable modems use.”
Both Treeno and QA Cafe are small companies and both have been profitable for several years, according to McEachern and Thibodeau. Larger and older than either — and also profitable — is Lamprey Networks Inc., a neighbor of the IOL in Durham that was launched by one of the founders of the lab itself, Barry Reinhold.
The IOL, officially launched in 1988, has roots that date back as far as 1978, Reinhold said, when he heard the dean of engineering express concern over how the school would keep up with rapidly advancing technology. After he graduated and went to work in a pretty standard IT job, Reinhold eventually found that he was testing software and technology for the company’s main vendor, Prime Computer Corp. He approached Prime with the idea that he get paid — at first in equipment and later in real money — to test its new technology. And that’s when he remembered the UNH dean’s concerns and went to the school with a proposal that became the IOL. “We took that concept and over time refined it and used the same idea of doing work on standards and emerging technology, which we would use to train our students,” Reinhold said.
With 25 employees on staff, Lamprey has been a profitable company since “about 2004,” Reinhold said.
For Jason Walls, senior technologist at the IOL, the lab, despite its global reputation among networking companies, has always been about the students. The approximately 150 member companies of the various testing consortia get the added benefit of getting ready-made employees coming straight out of UNH.
“It really is key. We are addressing the engineering pipeline,” Walls said.
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