Barrington's Excalibur Technology plans expansion

Barrington-based Excalibur Technology Corp. (www.excaltech.com), which provides network, Internet and Web services to businesses, is expanding.

The company recently opened a third franchise office in Jacksonville, Fla. Another is in Melbourne, Fla. and Lexington, Ky. More such franchises are planned. The company also has a data center in Lake in the Hills.

Not bad for a guy who started the business in his parents' basement 15 years ago. Founder and President Scott Cummings, 34, now has 30 employees.

"I've always liked the legends of King Arthur, and Excalibur means best of the best. That's where the company name comes from," Cummings said. "I like to think of our services like that."

Excalibur offers IT services to small and mid-sized businesses, including computer sales, on-site technical support, Web site hosting and programming. All work is performed by employees here and nothing is outsourced, he said.

Cummings discovered his entrepreneurial spirit early in life. He was on the dean's list at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when he was taking a computer science class. But he felt the program was "behind the times."

"That's when Microsoft became a big player," Cummings said.

He left college to take Microsoft training and decided to go into business for himself. He started with a video game store in Buffalo Grove, and later fixed computers in the backroom. When that repair business expanded, he decided to open Excalibur with his first client GSF Mortgage in Schaumburg.

Today, his company does IT work for the Hoffman Estates, Gurnee, Vernon Hills park districts, as well as some small businesses in other suburbs.

With more clients, he's planning to open another location in McHenry and hire more workers in the next few months, he said.

Surfing: Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent, which has offices in Naperville, has launched the industry's first 100 gigabit Ethernet service router. This will help service providers meet the massive bandwidth demands due to the explosive growth in video traffic and sophisticated consumer and business IP services. To give you an idea of its speed: it provides capacity for more than six weeks of streaming video that could be transmitted in under a second. A day's worth of uncompressed CD-quality audio could be transmitted in under a second. And a 90-minute high-definition TV video could be transmitted in less than a second.