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| fibertoday.com |
| Vol.3, No. 199 |
| October 17, 2000 |
| Dear Friend: |
| Stellar Executive Team Heads Startup Innovance |
| An extraordinary list of fiber optic industry executives has been compiled by startup Innovance. Key leaders include Kevin Kalkhoven (non-executive Board member), Peter Allen (CEO), James Frodsham (COO), Wayne Edmunds (CFO), Alan Solheim (CTO), David Nicholson (Sr. V.P., Product Dev.) and Lucas Hsu, (V.P., Technology). |
| Kalkhoven is well known as the former CEO of JDS Uniphase who currently helps to run the venture capital fund KPL Ventures; Allen was vice president of business development and general manager of the optoelectronics organization with Nortel's Optical Networks division; Frodsham was vice president of product management for Nortel's optical networking business and involved with Nortel's highly successful |
| 10 Gbps DWDM efforts; Edmonds was vice president of finance for Lucent's Optical Networking Division. Solheim worked at Nortel and is described as being "one of the telecom industry's leading high-capacity optical networking scientists;" another Nortel employee, Nicholson was considered the key hardware scientist behind the first OC-48 product and also worked on Nortel's OC-192 design team; and Hsu spent many years at Lucent, where he had extensive experience with opamps. |
| Not surprisingly, the company is divided into two main offices: one in Ottawa near Nortel and other in Piscataway, N.J., not far from Lucent. The current split is 60-40 Ottawa-Piscataway, Frodsham told us. The company, which launched in July, now has 60 employees and expects to ramp up to 300 in the next 12 months. |
| Innovance plans on being an end-to-end provider of optical networking but Frodsham, in Corvis-like manner, would not provide further details. He did say the team is assembling a strong crew of bench scientists. |
| Nor would Frodsham get into details related to financing, except to say the company has all the seed money it requires and will at some point be going out for more. |