In tech, it pays to follow Terry Matthews

Terrance Matthews, the technology entrepreneur who led the Mitel Networks growth story in the 1980s and the Newbridge Networks growth story in the 1990s, is now working on doing the same with March Networks Corp.. Given Matthews’ proven capabilities, owning some shares in March Networks, a provider of video-based intelligence tools, would seem to be a good bet.

But the stock was always been rather expensive since going public in 2002. Now, in the past three months, it has lost more than half its value and sits 10% below the IPO price. In March, a major customer, Wal Mart, announced it was cutting orders. And this week the company revised projected 2008 earnings downward from breakeven to a loss of $5 to $10 million (due to a ramping up of spending on new products and marketing efforts).

Matthews is good at sniffing out the growth seams in technology, as Mitel and Newbridge demonstrate. When he moves on to saying expanding broadband capacity makes video applications over Internet Protocol “an area of frontier work, an area with upside beyond belief," you better believe it.

At least his fellow executives/directors seem to. Since the collapse, four of them have purchased over $300,000 worth of shares. And Matthew’s investment company, Wesley Clover Corp., is sitting on 4.1 million shares (for which he’ll likely want to get a good price).