Paul J. Severino

Born in Paterson, N.J., Severino spent his high school years in Totowa, New Jersey at a Catholic technical high school, Don Bosco Technical Institute, where he studied electronics. He attended Fairleigh Dickinson College for two years and then transferred to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where he received his B.S.E.E. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1969 and subsequently served as a Trustee. After receiving his degree, he joined Digital Equipment Corporation as a Product Development Engineer, where he designed interface boards for the PDP-11.

In 1972 he left Digital for Prime Computer, Inc., again as a Product Development Engineer, designing interface boards including I/O and A to D converters. At the time, Prime Computer, Inc. was designing a Honeywell minicomputer replacement. Severino was also involved in the startup of Data Translation, Inc. in 1974 as its Vice President of Engineering, joining co-founders Fred Molinari and Aaron Fishman. They were building A to D converter boards for the Intel platform, and he helped build that company to $10 million in revenue by 1980.

He was a co-founder of Interlan, Inc., a minicomputer networking company, in 1981. Interlan manufactured an Ethernet board that could connect multiple minicomputers together to form a network. The company was very successful, and in 1985 it was sold to MiCom. Severino then co-founded Wellfleet Communications in 1986 to design internetworking products. The company was extremely successful and for two years in a row was Fortune Magazine's fastest growing company, with $500 million in revenue by 1994.

He was a co-founder and chairman of Bay Networks, Inc. in October 1994, which was formed by a merger between Synoptics Communications, Inc. based in Santa Clara, Calif. and Wellfleet Communications, Inc. based in Billerica, Mass. Severino served as Chairman of Bay Networks until November 1996, after which Bay Networks was acquired by Nortel Networks in 1998.

He went on to serve as a Director of Sonus Networks (NASDAQ-SONS) and Analog Devices (NYSE-ADI). He also served in industry and government business groups and was a former Chairman of the Massachusetts Technology Development Corp. (MTDC). Severino was also a founder and past chairman of the Massachusetts Network Communications Council in 1997. He subsequently became an investor and advisor to emerging technology companies. He received honorary degrees from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and The University of Massachusetts, and served as a Trustee of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts.