MOVERS & INNOVATORS: Mike Champa, Knowing how to pick his partners

When he was ready to abandon a five-year career as a history teacher, little did Mike Champa know that he might make a little bit of history himself one day.

"I basically talked myself into the marketing department of Codex," recalled the president and chief executive officer of Tewksbury-based Winphoria Networks.

Evidently, Champa had done his homework. Codex became a known name in the technology circle for its data modems, and Champa's career trajectory was on track.

At Codex he would meet Desh Deshpande, and eventually headed up sales at Deshpande's Cascade Communications, a prominent Massachusetts data switch manufacturer that eventually was acquired by Lucent Technologies.

Like many of his Cascade colleagues, he hopped directly to running his own company. He became CEO of Omnia Communications, a company that gave telecom carriers the ability to offer services over their optical networks. Omnia was bought for $474 million by Ciena Corp. in 1999, two years after the launch of the company.

Following his tutorship with Deshpande and Cascade CEO Dan Smith, Champa honed a relationship with a pair of area venture capitalists, Paul Ferri of Matrix Partners and Ed Anderson of North Bridge Venture Partners.

They had funded Cascade, and they would help grease the skids for Champa's next two companies, Omnia and Winphoria.

With his latest company, Champa showed once again his talent for hitching his horse to the right cart. Ferri and Anderson introduced him to two Lucent engineers, Shamim Naqvi and Murali Aravamudan, who are credited with inventing a distributed telecom switching architecture called a "softswitch."

Softswitches take traditional telecommunications signals and convert them to the Internet protocol. The pair had an idea for taking their platform and reengineering it for use in mobile telephone networks.

The wireless industry is now on the verge of upgrading mobile infrastructures to accommodate new "3G" data capabilities.

Mike Champa

chief executive officer

Winphoria Networks Inc.

THE DETAILS

Education: B.A., University of Massachusetts; MBA and master's in public policy, Suffolk University