In September of this year, Dave Clark was selected as the Tech Entrepreneur of the Year by The Technology Business Alliance of Nevada (TBAN). Though his company, CommPartners, was founded in 2003, Clark is a telecom industry veteran with more than 20 years of experience in the field.
He started in the telecom industry with a private pay telephone company, one of the first aspects of the business to be deregulated in the early 1980s. That company grew to provide specialized communications systems to the correctional industry, a client base, Clark said, that demands good product control In the early 1990s, Clark worked as a civilian contractor in Bosnia as part of the United Nations peacekeeping mission, and then came to Las Vegas in 1996 to join Mpower, one of the first major telecommunications companies to locate in the Valley.
In 2003, Clark had a conversation with three associates about the direction of the telecom industry. They agreed that a purpose-built bridge network between IT and the traditional phone world would be the next wave of development, and CommPartners was born. Clark explained that even though it is possible to move data over traditional phone lines, it is not always clean and easy. The idea behind CommPartners was to build a network from the ground up that could carry both data and voice, converting data to traditional protocol so it can be delivered through the phone lines and vice versa.
The company now operates in the 48 contiguous states, with approval for Alaska pending as this article went to press. Because of the nature of the telecom industry, approval is a state-by-state process, with CommPartners applying to interact with each traditional phone company in order to provide their carrier services. In October 2006, CommPartners ran just under 400 million minutes on its network.
In addition to being a carrier’s carrier, CommPartners also focuses on providing Web-based applications such as call centers, e-marketing, video streaming and Webcasts, broadcast e-mailing and e-newsletters, and online events, making them available to small- to medium-sized companies.
