Who's Who In The Telecom Corridor® Area
Paul Peck's Labor Of Love Turns Into Major Online Database
In the late 1950s when Collins Radio attracted the first generation of engineers to the area by moving much of its defense communications business to Richardson, and Eugene McDermott, J. Erik Jonsson and Cecil Green were building Texas Instruments a few miles to the south, they surely never imagined the area would grow into one of the densest high-tech areas in the United States.
Since then thousands of technologists have worked in what is today known around the world as the Telecom Corridor® area. Some come and go and some spend their careers here.
Paul Peck, vice president of operations for Covaro Networks and a member of the MTBC's 3rd Friday Steering Committee, is one of those who has spent his career in the Telecom Corridor®, and his passion for the people and the history of the area is evident.
Nearly two years ago he began putting together a family tree of the Telecom Corridor®.
Now called the Telecom Corridor® Genealogy Project, the database chronicles individuals' career moves in and around the area beginning in the late 1950s with Collins Radio and Texas Instruments. Each entry includes the name of a worker, the company that person worked for, the company he or she moved to, whether the decision was voluntary or forced by a merger or acquisition, and the year of the move.
The concept first came up during a meeting of the Richardson Economic Development Technology Advisory Board, on which Peck also sits. It was mentioned again at a meeting of the 3rd Friday Steering Committee, and Peck decided to run with it.
Peck, who says he feels like the Forrest Gump of the Telecom Corridor® because he's witnessed so many historical events during his nearly three decades working in the Corridor, started at Texas Instruments in 1974 and worked at nine other companies before joining Covaro Networks in 2003.
The first entries in the database were Peck's own contacts. He then asked those contacts for their contacts, and so on.
“I love this stuff,” Peck said during a June 2004 interview with The Dallas Morning News . “You find yourself researching and following up with people all day. I really do believe that when we have a common history, we suddenly have a lot more to talk about.”
In April 2003, just a few months after Peck initially began the project, Claire Lewis-Martin, executive vice president of Recursion Software and also a member of the 3rd Friday Steering Committee, introduced Peck to Dr. Michael Savoie, director of the University of Texas at Dallas' School of Management's Center for Information Technology and Management (CITM). CITM officially “adopted” the project in October of that year and has since allocated grant dollars to the project, assigned researchers and developed a Web site where people can enter their own career movements.
What began as a few hundred individual entries has exploded into thousands. CITM has gathered profiles on 1,000 companies, which includes company history, relevant facts and key people, and names of 5,000 other companies.
In an attempt to complete that information and raise awareness of the project, CITM is conducting an e-mail campaign and will begin distributing the first charts early next year at events such as the MTBC luncheons.
“We are really encouraging people to go onto to the database and help us out,” Dr. Savoie said. “The more people we can get to do that the more information we have to work with.”
Today, the project serves as a historical framework for the Telecom Corridor® and shows how connected local technologists are. The City of Richardson even uses it in its economic development endeavors as proof that the Telecom Corridor's vast and diverse talent pool makes the city an attractive location for companies interested in relocating, expanding or starting up.
To view the database or to submit information for the project, visit http://citm.utdallas.edu/telecom_gen.