HUBER+SUHNER celebrates 25 years of the POLATIS business in Cambridge

Addressing the team before a ceremonial cake cutting, Managing Director, Robert Smith, reflected on the contribution made by both the longer serving and more recent team members, praising “An amazing combination of skills, experience, insights and innovation that has generated a lot of loyalty from customers.”

Some of the company’s longest serving staff reflected on their time with the business. Nick Parsons, now CTO Communications at HUBER+SUHNER, said: “Joining POLATIS® in 2002, I quickly realised that Cambridge is a great place to grow a deep tech start-up, with a world-class talent pool and ecosystem to draw upon.” Bryan King, Lead Mechanical Designer, added : “It's always been an exciting place to work, pushing the latest technology and working on a world leading product.” Louise Gyton, Senior Materials Controller, commented: “One thing stood out from previous companies I had worked at - the people, all working together towards a common goal, working tirelessly and sometimes long into the night, to get our product over the line and out to the customer”. Daryl Smith, Senior Product Engineer and the longest continuously serving team member who cut the celebration cake, added: “Above all I appreciate the friendships, shared knowledge and experiences (life and work) and good humour that seems to be in the DNA of this remarkable company.”

Part of HUBER+SUHNER since 2016 the company has been a resident of the Cambridge Science Park throughout its history. POLATIS® optical circuit switches are used in a wide variety of applications in fiber optic networks found in data centers, network and component test laboratories, cybersecurity and network monitoring systems. POLATIS® is experiencing a huge upturn in interest and business with the burgeoning demands of AI data centers driving operators towards the much lower power consumption of optical circuit switches.

Today the Cambridge site, with about 100 employees, is still the focus of all design, development and prototyping of new switch products while manufacturing is based in Poland, where only eight days previously a new state-of-the-art factory was opened, with a current headcount of over 200.

In conclusion Mr. Smith continued: “We are not just celebrating 25 years of POLATIS® and its existence today, we are also celebrating POLATIS® as it moves into the next chapter of our business, a very exciting future.”