ENTREPRENEUR WATCH

Steve Pettit is the president and co-founder of Greenland-based Great Bay Software. Michael McCord photo

Steve Pettit and his entrepreneurial co-conspirators are happy to be "located far away from corporate America," in a high-tech development center just off of Route 33 in Greenland. Which doesn't mean that Pettit, the president and co-founder of Great Bay Software, doesn't want to serve corporate America with breakthrough networking solutions.

Petit, along with colleagues Christopher Flagg and Bob Durkee (all three worked together at the former Cabletron Systems), originally founded Blue Spruce Technologies in 2004 as a one-stop networking shop. Much to their surprise, they discovered a hole in networking development and deployment. To make a potentially long and sophisticated explanation short, Pettit said that Great Bay was started a year later to supply a solution "" which emerged as its flagship Beacon Endpoint Profiler. "Everyone focused on building a staircase (network). What we saw was that the first two steps were missing," Pettit told Ventures.

So far, so very good for both companies which work in concert or separately depending on client needs and have 15 employees. Those clients include Reed Smith, one of the top 15 law firms in the world, and the Whitworth Institute of Technology. Pettit told Ventures that he is confident that 2007 will prove to be a "spending year" that will accelerate Great Bay's "off the charts" growth.

Seacoast Ventures: You went to Thomas College in Maine. What was your major?

Steve Pettit: (Laughing) I majored in soccer.

SV: Did you always want to be an entrepreneur?

SP: I've always wanted to start a company but I didn't know what kind of industry it would be in. I had a lot to learn. At Pine State Trading (a wholesale food company in Augusta, Maine), I began learning the ins and outs of running a business in sales, financial structure and leadership. My mentor there taught me about the importance of making today important and to follow through on the little things to create strong employee morale.

SV: How did you end up at Cabletron and what did you learn there?

SP: In 1995 I was really interested in technology and the Internet but I didn't know anything. I left Pine State and took an entry level position at Cabletron in Rochester. It was a crazy place to work but there was so much opportunity for advancement and learning about everything if you wanted to. It was 40 hours of training and 40 hours of work. But I took in so much about hi-tech sales and the sales process. It gave me an incredible business background into product development and product life cycle.

SV: What is Great Bay's market?

SP: Most of our customers are in the finance, health care, insurance and education sectors. What we discovered at Blue Spruce was a enterprise network security void and found a niche in NAC, or network admission control. We are working now as a partner with Cisco and Juniper Networks.

SV: Do you have an exit strategy goal for Great Bay and Blue Spruce?

SP: No. We are so excited thinking about the long term that we don't have an exit strategy now. Our goal for both is sustained profitability and growth for both and to recoup our investment which we are doing.