Alumni - Northern Kentucky University
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If you can master math, you can do anything. I believe I have lived that. Math taught me how to look at a situation, see what the key issues are, analyze and resolve them logically and rationally, and to do so in a timely fashion. Math also trained my brain so that I can come up to speed on new areas quickly.
Tom graduated from NKU in May 1980 with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and a concentration in computer science. He received a Master of Science two years later from North Carolina State University in applied mathematics. While at NC State he worked on systems network architecture for IBM and changed career paths. Having noted that he made more money part-time with IBM than he would as a full-time professor, he decided to forego a teaching career for opportunities in business.
In 1982 Tom moved to New England where he has lived ever since. He worked at Wang Laboratories in various engineering and management positions before moving on to Cabletron (now Enterasys Networks Inc.), a provider of network solutions, in 1991. At Cabletron he got his first taste of entrepreneurship by founding and directing the companyrsquo;s IBM Interconnectivity Products Business Unit. The unit became Cabletron’s most profitable division, reaching $240 million in revenue in the second year of it’s existence.
In 1996, Tom moved to a position at Cascade Communications managing its xDSL business unit, and a year later he founded and became CEO of his own company, Castle Networks, a voice softswitch company. Castle Networks’ circuit-to-packet platform attracted the notice of corporate giant Siemens, which then bought Castle Networks for over $300 million in 1999. Tom became vice president of Siemens' Voice Products Group and when Siemens merged other router companies into the group to form Unisphere Networks, he was named COO for Unisphere.
In 2001, Tom left Unisphere and semi-retired, serving on several boards and as a part time Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Bessemer Venture Capital in Wellesley, MA. Fifteen months later, in November 2002, the board of WaveSmith Networks, upon which Tom served, asked him to take over the operation of the company and he became CEO that data networking company. In early 2003, Tom engineered the acquisition of WaveSmith by Cienna Corporation, a Maryland-based optical switch maker.
Tom and his wife Pam have three sons: Michael 19, Sean 18, and Colin 14. He serves several volunteer organizations, including serving as Chairman of the North Andover (MA) Youth Services.
He is on the Board of Directors of Central Catholic High School in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and has spent fifteen years coaching various youth sports, including select soccer.
