- Classmates in 1988, colleagues in 2007: Eric Checkoway and Frank Cavallaro.
When Frank Cavallaro ’88 sits at the head of a conference table with his senior sales managers at Converge—a global company headquartered in Peabody—up to half of those gathered there are UMass Amherst alumni.
This didn’t happen by design, said Cavallaro, who moved his way up from trading fl oor to CEO of the world’s largest independent distributor of computer components, but it works for him. At UMass Amherst, he earned a degree in Legal Studies and Economics. He credits the cohesiveness of his core group in part to their shared experience at a school where resources and opportunities abound but success depends on individual initiative.
Cavallaro runs an organization with major facilities in North America, Asia, and Europe, which keeps him traveling. But when he’s on-site, he regularly crosses paths with Eric Checkoway ’88, (general manager for North American trade), Mike Gately ’87 (director of commodity management), David Cohen ’87 (channel distribution manager), Paul Zecher ’91 (commodity manager for memory), and Mark Baldyga ’81 (commodity manager for integrated circuits).
In 1989, Cavallaro was the 14th sales employee brought into a company that now cuts more than 400 paychecks worldwide. He recalls that the founders wore fl ip-flops and T-shirts when they interviewed him to join a firm poised for expansion. Converge now has revenues in the half-billion-dollar range and a host of services and capabilities that remove bumps in the supply chain. “We help smooth out the ‘too much / not enough’ problem,” said Gately. “With new technologies rolling out all the time and companies trying to forecast what products they can build, it is an impossible task for individual companies to solve accurately.”
Much of the Converge building in Peabody is occupied by a trading room fl oor, a pit, and a honeycomb of cubicles around an electronic board. The board constantly fl ashes current pricing information on components like central processing units (CPUs) and computer chips. The setup is replicated in Shanghai, Amsterdam, and Singapore. Suppliers and customers for the building blocks of sophisticated electronic equipment benefi t from Converge’s global capacity to keep supply and demand in sync and identify opportunities when prices on the spot market fl uctuate, often quickly and signifi cantly.
Although the UMass Amherst graduates in management didn’t know each other in college, they come together to cheer Minutemen teams. They recognize the qualities in each other that helped them succeed at UMass Amherst. “Particularly in our industry, you have to go out and make a name for yourself, take initiative, be a self-starter,” said Checkoway, “and to get the most out of UMass, you have to do the same thing.”
Cavallaro agrees: “I learned at UMass that there are opportunities out there; you need to go out and harness them and shape them. UMass really prepared me to run an organization like this.”
