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By MICHAEL BRAGA
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 15, 2001
Staff cutbacks at some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies -- 3Com, Lucent, Nortel and Paradyne -- offer ample evidence that the telecommunications sector is in a painful downturn.
At Digital Lightwave, however, the misfortune of competitors and customers is being viewed as an opportunity.
The Clearwater company, which makes equipment for testing and monitoring high-speed fiber optic cables, is looking to add 20 to 40 research and development engineers to its payroll this year. It also wants to open an engineering lab in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina.
So Digital Lightwave ran full-page want ads in the Jan. 7 editions of the St. Petersburg Times, the Tampa Tribune, the Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call and the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer.
Why those newspapers? The Tampa Bay area is Digital Lightwave's headquarters. It also happens to be the home of Paradyne Networks, which cut 20 managerial positions this month.
Allentown is near Digital Lightwave's engineering lab in Holmdale, N.J. It also is near Lucent's headquarters in Murray Hill, N.J. Lucent reported in December that it intends to cut costs by $1-billion.
Raleigh-Durham is where Digital Lightwave chief executive Gerry Chastelet lived before moving to the Tampa Bay area. He wants to establish a presence in that area by the middle of the year to tap into the labor pool employed at companies such as Nortel and Alcatel. Nortel said Thursday it is about to pare off 4,000 people, or 4 percent of its work force.