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In 1999, Leon Navickas had a lot of folks asking him what was taking him so long to build a big company.
"We didn't have a lot of buzz, and we weren't being pursued aggressively to be bought," said Navickas, founder and chief executive of Centra Software Inc.
Taking a contrary path is nothing new to Navickas. Early on at Centra, he heard from many friends that the Internet infrastructure simply wasn't advanced enough for the live, multimedia collaboration applications they were working on.
The real-time video and audio conferencing segments wouldn't have enough bandwidth to work properly, they said.
But in 1997, Centra launched its first product and rapidly signed on customers like Nortel Networks and Fidelity Investments.
"These are companies that were in real pain," Navickas said. "They wanted to get people together to collaborate, but their budgets and time were constrained.
Centra's software melds real-time video, audio and multimedia...