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John St. Amand Joins Highland Capital Partners As Venture Partner

Posted on: Friday, 14 December 2007, 09:00 CST

LEXINGTON, Mass. and MENLO PARK, Calif., Dec. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Highland Capital Partners, a leading global venture capital firm focused on helping great people build great companies, today announced that John St. Amand has joined the firm as a Venture Partner. In his new role, St. Amand will help identify new entrepreneurial investment opportunities and lend his expertise to assist Highland portfolio companies.

"My experience at Telica provided first-hand exposure into the quality of Highland's organization and the value and support they deliver to their portfolio companies," said St. Amand. "I am excited to work with exceptional entrepreneurs and management teams to help bring the next generation of innovative communications technologies and solutions to market. I can't think of a stronger platform from which to do this than at Highland."

St. Amand is the founder and former CEO of Telica, a Highland-backed company that specialized in advanced switching and transmission telecommunication equipment. Under his leadership, Telica developed and delivered the most highly reliable and scalable VoIP switching solution to carriers worldwide. From its founding in 1998, Telica attracted more than $120 million in venture capital funding, grew to more than 240 employees and secured such marquee clients as Verizon, MCI, McLeodUSA, Telstra, WilTel Communications, Primus Canada, Rogers Wireless and KMC Telecom.

After the 2004 acquisition of Telica by Lucent , St. Amand served as the President of Lucent's Converged Core Networks, where he was responsible for core network products serving wireline and 2G/3G wireless worldwide service providers. Following the merger of Alcatel and Lucent , St. Amand became President of Multi-Core Networks, a $2 billion business that encompassed worldwide, core voice and data network elements from both companies.

"John is a proven Highland entrepreneur and CEO that has consistently shown excellent business acumen in building a successful company from ground up," said Sean Dalton, Managing General Partner with Highland. "His creative vision for the evolution of the equipment industry and extensive industry network makes John a natural, high value-add partner for the companies that we back. We welcome him to the Highland team."

Prior to founding Telica, St. Amand was the founder and General Manager of the Embedded Telephony Solutions (ETS) division of Dynamics Research Corporation (DRC), responsible for development of carrier class switching systems. Before ETS, St. Amand was instrumental in DRC's entry into the telecommunications market, where he developed the strategic plan and managed the development of a next generation broadband-capable OSS. St. Amand earned a BSEE from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an MSEE from Northeastern University.

About Highland Capital Partners

Highland Capital Partners was founded with the mission of helping great people build great companies. Since its inception in 1988, the firm has taken a sector-focused approach to investing in exceptional communications, consumer, digital media, healthcare and information technology companies. With $3 billion of committed capital and offices in Boston, Silicon Valley, Shanghai and Geneva, Highland has invested in and worked to create such firms as Ask Jeeves, Avid Technology, CheckFree, Conor Medsystems, Continental Cable, Helicos BioSciences, lululemon athletica, Lycos, MapQuest, Ocular Networks, Odyssey Healthcare, Starent Networks, Sybase, Telica and VistaPrint. For more information, visit Highland's web site at http://www.hcp.com/.

Highland Capital Partners

CONTACT: Alison Howard of Highland Capital Partners, +1-781-861-5614,ahoward@hcp.com

Web site: http://www.hcp.com/

Source: PRNewswire

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