An Inside Perspective: Optics 2013

My name is Sam Sadoulet. I am the Chief Operating Officer for Edmund Optics. I have been here fifteen, sixteen years now, in roles ranging from engineering to manufacturing to technology. Anybody who's paying attention, obviously the past few years have been a rollercoaster ride. I think it’s a level of anxiety that we haven't seen in a while. Knowing that forecasts are not going to be accurate, knowing that it is hard to predict what will happen in the future, you have to position yourself in such a way that you can react. Go back to, there are certain things that have to do with deployment or redeployment of technologies and of course the certain technology trends associated with emerging markets. A good example of that for instance is around, I would say, the telecom industry. During its bust of 2001, this was when you saw all this filter technology and thin films technology being redeployed into life sciences. And when it comes to optics or imaging we address a lot of this and we enable a lot of these developments, so we do have to pay attention to this kind of trend. Perhaps the best place to keep track of these trends is at a trade show. It is a good opportunity for us to get a census to new technologies that we can distribute or leverage into our own products. I would say on this side it is really customer focused, comparing notes, and getting a feeling for how the general industry is doing and of course looking for any kind of emerging technologies.