Alumni Gerry Pompa wins TeleSpan’s 2007 Pace Award

Congratulations to Pitt CS Alum and Industry Board member, Gerard Pompa, who was a recipient of the 2007 TeleSpan Pace Award. The TeleSpan Pace honors collaboration professionals
who have a definitive positive impact on shaping the industry. Gerard Pompa works for Compunetix.

Gerard Pompa, Vice-President and Division Manager for the organization’s Communications Systems Division, has acted as a visionary for the future of collaboration, leading the product development and building relationships that have helped pave the way to Compunetix’s decades of success.

To read the official press release, please click here and Congratulations Gerry!

Compunetix celebrates 40 Years!

Compunetix celebrates it's 40th anniversary. View the official Press Release here.

2008 marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of Compunetics by Dr. Ing Giorgio Coraluppi, one of the pioneers of Pittsburgh’s technology community. What began as a small system designer and manufacturer for the federal government in 1968 now stands as three distinct global companies – Compunetics (ICS), Compunetix (IX) and Chorus Call – all with distinct specialties in the rapidly evolving telecommunications industry.

“Every founder is taught that he should have a business plan, but I didn’t have any such thing when I started,” Coraluppi admitted. “I was at a point in my life where I thought I could do anything. When I started Compunetics, I didn’t have any capital, a business plan or a product, just the anticipation that the company could do great things.

“Early on, I developed an intellectual environment with a lot of emphasis on the human element,” Coraluppi continued. “We were bidding for federal contracts against the big boys of the industry. It took a little bit of nerve and a bit of luck, but one-on-one, we could compete against anybody.”

Now, at the 40-year benchmark for the tech triumvirate, it’s quite evident that Coraluppi was dead on. Not only has Compunetics become one of the premier printed circuit board production shops in the country, offering highly sophisticated circuitry to niche markets, Compunetix and Chorus Call are competing at the highest level in their respective markets as well.

Compunetix, the industry leader in developing and manufacturing multipoint collaboration platforms for the teleconferencing industry, finds itself in an enviable market position. Due to the shrinking nature of the global industry, most of Compunetix’s traditional competition was bought out, leaving a considerable gap in the market space.

The company’s most recent conferencing bridge offering, the Contex Summit, has redefined the industry standard in terms of capacity, scalability, footprint and flexibility. Capable of hosting up to 9,600 ports, the Summit is fully Internet-enabled, supporting Web control, voice-over IP, streaming and data conferencing.

“When we started Compunetix, teleconferencing didn’t exist,” Coraluppi said. “It was an opportunity that we uncovered along the way. We have been very adaptive to the teleconferencing landscape evolving in front of us and by doing this Compunetix became a standard of reference in the teleconferencing industry.”

Since Chorus Call was officially spun out of Compunetix in 1996, the teleconferencing service provider has made a name for itself globally with excellent customer service and reliable, state-of-the-art conferencing capabilities. Over the last five years, Chorus Call has experienced remarkable growth, expanding its global reach to include Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and Australia. With nine satellite offices, Chorus Call caters to Fortune 1000 companies on six continents, delivering integrated, customer-centric conferencing capabilities built on the Compunetix collaboration platform. This unique relationship empowers Chorus Call to provide innovative and customized solutions to each customer.

“The organizations interact with one another to achieve a vertical value chain for each other’s customers,” explains Coraluppi. “For example, Chorus Call benefits from exposure to the rich Compunetix think tank environment. Conversely, it offers stand-by capacity to Compunetix customers, as well as early market validation of Compunetix software solutions.”

Just as Compunetix served as the genesis for Chorus Call, the company has been integral in the formation of the wider technology community here in Pittsburgh. Both ICS and IX have mentored and financially supported for-profit and non-profit companies alike over the years including Dielectric Solutions, Design Advance, TalkShoe, the Pittsburgh Technology Council, the Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse and The Technology Collaborative.

“We have contributed a significant amount of time and resources to the regional technology industry,” Coraluppi said. “From mentoring, to investments, to providing our credentials to secure investments, we have been a strong supporter of the technology community.”