Gibney, founder and CEO of eCoast Sales Solutions, has returned to familiar ground where he served in numerous executive jobs at Cabletron - including vice president of sales operations - for a decade. But his focus on a recent clear and cold day is firmly on the future.

"We’ve totally outgrown our Dover facility and it just happened that this was available," Gibney said about eCoast’s recent expansion to the building at the top of hill of the industrial park that was essentially started by Cabletron in the late 1980s before it became the largest private employer in the state by the mid-1990s.

"To be honest, I really haven’t given it much thought," Gibney said about Cabletron’s history of developing and selling routers and switchers to an increasingly wired business world. "We needed space to expand."

eCoast Sales Solutions was founded in April 2000 when Gibney decided it was time to go his own way and run his own company.

The company specializes in providing outsourced sales and marketing services to larger, often much larger, high-tech companies such as Cisco and Nortel that need to generate fast and reliable sales leads for existing and new product lines.

"During my 10 years at Cabletron, we had outsourced some of this to national companies, but what we got weren’t leads but poor examples," Gibney said.

"I did a lot of due diligence before I started because this was a very crowded field," Gibney said. "Because I used to do it, I also knew there was a bias against outside leads and, historically, so many of those leads just sit there and nothing happens."

Though the summer of 2000 was near the peak the dot.com/high-tech boom, and finding help wasn’t easy because so many companies were expanding and hiring, Gibney and his new company were well positioned to weather the coming storm.

eCoast was the company more companies started to turn to as they started cutting their sales and marketing staffs.

"At first, we couldn’t find any employees and then I had people show up at my doorstep," Gibney said. "What helped us is that the inside sales departments of many companies took a terrible hit. There was a pool of experienced, qualified technology workers who knew the business and were looking for work."

Because of the economic climate and Gibney’s sizable Rolodex of industry contacts, eCoast Sales was able to establish itself quickly - especially when the company landed jobs with Cabletron spin-offs Aprisma and Enterasys, which was working on a joint venture with Siemens.

Because of the traumatic changes caused by the Cabletron breakup, companies such as Aprisma were left adrift. Aprisma was not unlike many startup companies desperate for new clients to survive. Gibney said it had an additional problem in that "they didn’t know who their customers were and they needed help identifying them."

eCoast Sales, Gibney said, played an important role in helping Aprisma establish its own identity.

By the time the middle of 2001 rolled around, Gibney said he had a good feeling his company would survive.

"We had work and we were already beginning then to specialize in the network security and Internet telephony sectors we concentrate on today," Gibney said.

The buzzword for the outsourced sales industry is "demand generation," and eCoast Sales Solutions has succeeded because of a superior database and a telemarketing sales force that knows how to track down leads, Gibney said.

"We find (our customers) opportunities and then direct them immediately to outside sales or sales distributors," Gibney said. That allows the company to focus on quality and give measurable return on investment, or ROI, to its customers.

eCoast has grown quickly. Gibney now oversees a staff of 80 - 65 are directly involved with sales - and soon more than 30 will be working at the Rochester facility where Gibney has leased more than 3,000 square feet of space and has an option for more space if he needs it.

"We’ve set up a call center here and it’s time to let ’em loose," Gibney said.

The "let ’em loose" was not unlike the call for Cabletron sales personnel who have a reputation for being fierce, smart and hard working.

Echoes of the past

Enterasys, the successor company to Cabletron, announced Jan. 18 that for $10 million it had settled the last Cabletron-related class-action lawsuit against the company and notable executives such as co-founders Robert Levine and Craig Benson.

For his part, Benson was elected New Hampshire governor in 2002 due in part to his corporate expertise.

While it might be easy to dismiss or ignore the legacy left behind by co-founders Craig Benson and Robert Levine, one does not have to look that far to see how that legacy has manifested itself in numerous ways and it doesn’t always make headlines.

Among other reasons, Gibney said eCoast Sales Solutions was named as a reflection of the spirit of the times and in particular as a nod to the eCoast Technology Roundtable, which was established in 1999 to promote the fast-growing high-tech/dot.com sectors on the Seacoast.

What is interesting, said another veteran of Cabletron who also founded his own company, is how Cabletron was a major catalyst for the high-tech explosion on the Seacoast.

"(Benson and Levine) turned the Seacoast-Portsmouth area into a high-tech corridor," said Steve Singlar, president of Single Digits, a Manchester-based company that makes access software for wireless hot spots.

"I started there at 23, and there were a lot of us who were drawn to the area because of Cabletron. It led the way for what was to come."

Singlar believes the Cabletron legacy has manifested itself in the number of new companies that have been created by Cabletron alumni.

"I think the greatest impact of Cabletron wasn’t that they employed 5,000 people," Singlar said. "It’s going to be the thousands of jobs created by people who worked at Cabletron."

Singlar doesn’t have to look far to prove his point. Of the nine Single Digits employees, six worked for Cabletron. He also points out companies such as eCoast Sales, Pixel Media, Smarts (which was recently purchased by EMC), NitroSecurity, and Pannaway Technologies as other companies started by and stocked with Cabletron alumni.

"It was a hotbed of a lot of talent and we were well trained," Singlar said. "We used to say if you could work at Cabletron, you could work anywhere. We learned to close deals."

Ginny Griffith, business development manager of the Greater Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce, held a similar title when she worked at Cisco. Griffith said companies such as eCoast and Single Digits represent the evolution of the high-tech sector in the region and the country.

"The dynamics have clearly changed," said Griffith, who has become involved with the eCoast Technology Roundtable. In particular, companies like eCoast Sales have benefited from changes happening with larger organizations such as Cisco that have new products for small to medium-sized businesses.

‘Let’s go sell’

Bill Gibney believes outsourcing will become more and more the business norm.

"We look more for long-term relationships with our clients," Gibney said. "But that means we might work on one project for only six months and it might be a few months before they need us again. It’s convenient for them, and if we do our job right, they will call us back."

What Gibney faces now is the difficulty of maintaining high-quality control in a fast-growing company filled with young workers, while trying to keep up the energy of the business startup stage eCoast has passed.

"It’s important to me that we keep up the excitement," Gibney said.

And he doesn’t have to look far to remind him of the past.

Though the former Cabletron building he occupies was mostly vacant when eCoast began moving in a few weeks ago, Gibney did notice something odd amid the cobwebs.

"There was one of those electronic billboards with the moving red letters and it was still plugged in ... it kept repeating the message, ‘Let’s go sell.’"

As he looked around the building, he said to himself, "Where did all the people go?"