Green Music Center :: News Clip

Telecom Reunion’ a chance to honor spirit of innovation

Monday, August 27, 2007
BRAD BOLLINGER,
BUSINESS JOURNAL EDITOR IN CHIEF

What better tribute could there be to Telecom Valley founder Don Green and the industry’s many entrepreneurs than a $7 million night out and the chance to leave a lasting legacy.

That in a nutshell is what is happening at the “Telecom Valley 20th Anniversary Reunion” on Oct. 6. Yes, it’s a reunion of telecom’s pioneers with all the fun and memories such a gathering will generate. Anyone who worked in the industry or associated with it yesterday and today is invited.

But it’s also about raising $7 million for the Donald and Maureen Green Music Center, under construction at Sonoma State University.

The dollar amount is important. But the purpose is even more so: to name the main, world-class concert facility Innovation Hall, dedicated to the pioneering spirit of Telecom Valley.

Some naysayers are probably thinking: “What Telecom Valley? It’s gone.”

Wrong.

While certainly not what it was at the height of the tech boom, the innovations of Telecom Valley are integral to the advanced communications systems we all enjoy today.

“Telecom Valley has been the birthplace for technology that fundamentally changed communications all over the world,” said Mike Hatfield, an industry veteran who worked for Mr. Green at Advanced Fibre Communications, now Tellabs, and co-founded Cerent, which sold to Cisco Systems in 1999 for $7 billion.

Of course, Sonoma County remains home to some of the world’s leading telecom innovators including Tellabs, JDSU, Calix and Turin Networks, Alcatel, Cisco and others.

And although not everyone involved became wealthy, telecom has created scores – if not hundreds – of millionaires, many of whom have stayed in the North Bay and are ongoing contributors to the region’s nonprofits and quality of life. Many have invested in new ventures that promise to keep the cycle going, started in large part when Mr. Green founded Optilink 20 years ago.

That cycle is driven by one thing – innovation, the fundamental underpinning of Telecom Valley and the key to the future of the North Bay’s economy in high-tech and elsewhere.

To have the SSU-Green concert facility named Innovation Hall would forever memorialize the power of imagination and risk-taking – two key elements of innovation – to change the world for the better.

And there is no more appropriate place for such an effort than this center, which itself represents world-class innovation in music, sound and learning.