53. Raising Its Voice

Cedar Point

Resume: Rider of the VoIP Wave

Influence Factor: Although the NH-based voice switch vendor has been around for just over 4 years, Cedar Point has rocketed from startup to a key player in the VoIP space, a success in large part due to the expansive résumés of team leaders like pres & CEO Andy Paff and vice chmn Mark Dzuban. Paff's been elbow deep in tech and telecom architecture for 20 years and has never so much as audited an engineering course, while Dzuban's seminal white paper at Bell Labs directly led to the establishment of AT&T Broadband. Because Cedar Point's brain trust was brought up in the biz on traditional Bell mentality, viz redundancy and QoS, it has been able to power primary line service in Liberty Cablevision's Puerto Rico system, was tapped as a primary VoIP partner by Comcast and had its "Safari C3" media switching system chosen by Charter for use in its voice deployments. Add to that a cool $20mln in additional VC funding, and 2004 was the year Cedar Point showed up on every ops' radar.

--AC