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Technology Stocks : Glenayre Technologies(GEMS)- a pure cellular PCS play? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 8bits who wrote (2864)	10/20/1998 11:49:00 PM
From: dale w ruckle	Respond to of 3431

Archive ISSUE 469: SUPPLEMENT Glenayre's Glenn Fawcett: Industrial innovation award Designer sees products yield more than $1 billion Chances are if you are one of the nearly 50 million pager users in North America, you are using a product manufactured by Glenayre and designed by Glenn Fawcett, winner of the 1998 B.C. Science and Technology award for industrial innovation. Fawcett, senior director of advanced systems for Glenayre, was the primary architect of two products that have yielded more than $1 billion in combined sales. He led the design team which in 1993 developed Glenayre's C2000 transmitter network control system, which synchronizes and tunes a large network of transmitters, and the GL3000 message switch, a system sold to wide-area paging carriers which accepts messages from the public telephone network and provides voice-mail service. The GL3000 switch has an 85 per cent market share in North America and a 50 per cent share of the international market. The UBC-educated electrical engineer is currently working on a product which he predicts will have a profound impact on the wireless communication industry. "For the last three years we have been working on a device that looks like a pager and fits in your palm or your pocket. It has both the transmitter and the receiver, and allows you to send and receive e-mail through our system. The two-way device has a display and a method of entering messages you want to send," said Fawcett. Two-way pagers, which Fawcett said will be available by the end of the year, offer continent-wide coverage at a flat rate. "You might give your child a pager, but not a cell phone," he said. A report on the U.S. paging industry produced by the Strategis Group, a consulting firm that specializes in the telecom industry, predicted that the new two-way services should add another 400,000 subscribers in 1998. The Glenayre design team has also developed a programming method that enables computers to perform 400 functions at a time. So far, five of Fawcett's ideas have been translated into U.S. patents. More are in the works. According to Fawcett, one of the main problems facing B.C.'s biggest high tech manufacturing companies is the shortage of qualified people. Glenayre's decision to consolidate its workforce in Vancouver has lowered production costs but increased its appetite for local engineers. "There's a real shortage of high technology people everywhere. Even Silicon Valley is hurting. We have 50 positions in engineering open right now. A month ago we had 160 positions open in the whole of Vancouver. I've heard that graduates from Simon Fraser University were getting an average of six offers each. Our industry really needs more people. "I have heard, and I believe, that if we could increase the number of qualified people, our industry in Vancouver could double its size," said Fawcett. Glenayre is building a $25-million facility in Vancouver to house its technical staff. On the positive side, he said that graduates who work in Vancouver usually stay, charmed by Vancouver's relative freedom from crime and pollution. "We've seen very few people leave for the Silicon Valley, despite the discrepancies in tax rate and salaries. In fact, we hire from the U.S. It is not causing a big drain," he said. Fawcett believes that the best way to encourage B.C.'s high tech industry is to provide plenty of highly trained people and a minimum of regulation. "To succeed in a highly competitive world, a high tech company needs to react quickly to its market. That means it needs a minimum of bureaucracy -- either internally generated or externally imposed. In some cases, very small companies may also need a bit of funding in their startup phase," he said. Since January 1997, Fawcett has served on the Electronics and Communications Technical Review Committee, a Technology B.C. program administered by the Science Council of B.C. on behalf of the Ministry of Employment and Investment. Committee members review the scientific and economic potential of proposed projects and the capabilities of the companies which apply. "The funding typically goes to smaller companies, especially startups. Typical awards are between $30,000 and $200,000 per year and average about $70,000. Only B.C.-based companies qualify and all funded work must take place in B.C.," said Fawcett. *