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making a onnection By Beth Smith
At 32, Mark Spencer is a pioneer in the world of open-source technology. Founder, chairman and chief technology officer of Digium, Inc., a company specializing in the development of private branch exchange (PBX) software and open-source telephony software, he began cutting his entrepreneurial teeth in the eighth grade when he wrote and sold a grading program to his teacher for $5. In junior high, Mark completed a science fair project on neural networks. By high school, he was designing integrated circuit structures. While a computer engineering student at Auburn, he began his first start-up company, Linux Support Services, and was creating an open-source telephone switch called Asterisk – technology that would thrust him to the forefront of open-source telecom systems. In the midst of his huge success in a field that is constantly changing, Mark refuses to take full credit for his accomplishments. Instead, he acknowledges the help he received along the way, including is his early mentor and friend Auburn electrical engineering faculty member Thad Roppel. Mark met Roppel while working on one of three science fair projects that won first place. He called Auburn’s College of Engineering and asked if someone could help him with neural networks. The secretary connected him to Roppel, a young assistant professor at the time, and before long Spencer was hanging out at the department’s microelectronics lab. “I didn’t count the cost in terms of the time it would take,” says Roppel. “So pretty soon I was struggling to keep up with this exceptionally vigorous youth and all of his questions and ideas, together with my own research and teaching requirements. In spite of this, Mark was such an inspiration that I was delighted to work with him on evenings and weekends, at his house and in my lab.” “Mark found a listening ear in Dr. Roppel which allowed him to keep moving on,” says Mark’s mother Samia, an alumni professor of French in Auburn’s Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. “As Mark developed ideas, Dr. Roppel was always available and supportive.”
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