Acme Packet CEO Talks Startup Lessons, Growing Pains

It's not every day I get to dine with the CEO of a public company worth $5 billion. Last month I sat down with Andy Ory, founder and chief exec at Bedford, MA-based Acme Packet, for an in-depth chat about his company's strategy and outlook in the area of networking innovation.

The setting

The setting was The Friendly Toast in Cambridge, MA. Ory has a soft spot in his heart for the Kendall Square area—back in the late '80s, he worked at Boston Innovation, the voice-mail pioneer whose office was straightway to where Friendly Toast sits today.

Over a BLT and huevos rancheros, we talked about everything from Ory's startup lessons to big-company concerns and business regulations, from Microsoft's acquisition of Skype to how Acme Packet is like Cisco back in 1993.

Leading light in the tech entrepreneurship scene

Ory is a leading light in the tech entrepreneurship scene. Earlier founding Acme Packet in 2000, he cut his teeth at Boston Innovation and at that time founded Priority Call Management, which sold to LHS Group for over $160 million in 1999. Over the past decade, he and his team have built Acme Packet into a leader in session border control—research that helps telecom network operators and big companies manage voice-over-IP and other communications and services over the Internet in an efficient and secure manner.

"Imagine you were visiting a company back in 1993 called Cisco Network Systems. 'What do you guys do?' We make a router. You might say, 'what's a router?' It's a piece of hardware and software. The reason is enterprises are converting their infrastructure to IP [Internet protocol] because of e-mail. If enterprise A wants to send e-mail to enterprise B, they need a router between them. Then, you might say, 'what percentage of enterprises are going to do e-mail?' And they'd say, every single one on the planet. 'And how many e-mail messages fill up a router?' To figure out how many routers you're going to sell. What was in effect interesting is, when you connect all these networks at the same time, a network effect ensues. Clearly I couldn't say to you, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Napster—I wish I could have," Ory says.

"Now let's fast forward 18 years and you're visiting my company," he says. "We make a session border controller. Enterprises and service providers are converting their service infrastructure to IP so they can do voice over IP. When they want to make a VoIP call from one enterprise to another, they need a session border controller to connect those two enterprises. So you'd say, 'what percentage of enterprises and service providers are going to do VoIP?' And clearly my answer is, every single one. …Straightway Page »

Business, life sciences, and innovation news — covering Boston, Seattle, San Diego, Detroit, San Francisco, New York and beyond.