Finisar was recently recognized by the Australian Trade Commission (Austrade) and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) for outstanding export achievement by a manufacturer and received the prestigious 2011 Large Advanced Manufacturing Award. Over the past year, Finisar Australia’s exports increased 70 percent and Finisar was applauded for its global focus on key customers and ability to target products and services to the specific needs of businesses.
Together, the 75 finalist companies, including the 12 winning companies, have contributed $5.6 billion in export earnings to the Australian economy, and employed more than 10,000 people spanning across the industries of agribusiness, arts, education and training, energy, services and manufacturing.
Australia’s esteemed Trade Minister, Craig Emerson, hosted the event and acknowledged Finisar as a part of the wide array of high caliber companies that reflect the depth and diversity of the Australian economy.
Simon Poole, Director of New Business Ventures at Finisar Australia received the award and stated “We are honored to have had our efforts and successes recognized by Austrade and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. A big thank you for the acknowledgement and support!” Watch Simon Poole’s acceptance speech here.
Finisar Australia’s Flexgrid™ technology has won another award – a National Engineering Excellence Award from the Institute of Engineers Australia. Fresh from winning the coveted Bradfield Award for best engineering project from the Sydney division of the IEAust, Flexgrid™ was one of only 6 national awards presented this year. The award was received by Steve Winnall, Director of Product Engineering, at a black-tie awards dinner in front of 600 guests at Parliament House in Canberra last month.
To quote the judges: “With the exponential growth of data capacity on the internet, the demand for more flexible and efficient optical network services from telecoms carriers is ever increasing. Finisar has met this demand with its new Flexgrid technology. Flexgrid is a unique software enhancement which allows telecommunications carriers to deploy bandwidth, flexibly and dynamically in their networks. Well ahead of their global competitors, Finisar have overcome several engineering challenges and have now successfully launched Flexgrid to the market.”
A video of Steve’s acceptance speech can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPvnMeLIJdI
Finisar was also represented at the ceremony by Andrew Bartos, Steve Frisken and Simon Poole, who, along with Steve Winnall and the MC for the evening, Sally Dominguez from the New Inventors TV Show, are shown in the photo below.
Congratulations to all involved in the Flexgrid™ program – and thank you for your hard work and dedication which have made the project so successful.
This week’s post comes from guest blogger, Dr. Simon Poole.
Us Australians are well known for being quiet, shy, retiring types, so it was great to get a chance to celebrate when Finisar Australia won the prestigious Bradfield Award at the Engineering Excellence Awards held in Sydney last month. The J.J.C. Bradfield Award is presented to the overall winner of Sydney Division of Engineers Australia Excellence Awards. It recognises an accomplishment of exceptional engineering merit and was presented to Finisar for the development of the Flexgrid™ capability for the DWP family of Wavelength Selective Switches.
Finisar’s FlexGrid™ is a flexible software enhancement within the company’s range of Wavelength Selective Switches (WSS) which allows telecommunications carriers to re-route signals throughout their network.
“A FlexGrid WSS can be used for instance if someone digs up a cable by accident. The telecommunication provider can use it to re-route traffic of phone and internet so phones don’t drop out. It can also be used on occasions like Mother’s Day when capacity goes up – carriers can use the Flexgrid to add more capacity to their network,” says Dr Steve Winnall, Director of Product Engineering at Finisar Australia.
“There are problems with the current legacy system which telecommunication provider now use. For example, in situations like the City-to-Surf (a major fun-run in Sydney attracting over 35,000 competitors) people couldn’t make a mobile call because there were so many people in one location. Our product helps to alleviate that and provide a better quality of service. This is a great success story in terms of manufacturing and innovation in Australia as 99 per cent of our sales have been through export, so it is a device that is being used all over the world.”
The judges said the Flexgrid is an innovation that “overcomes the current constraint associated with fixed channel plans used in current optical networks. It is a unique and world leading product in optical fibre telecommunications.
Finisar also won two other categories for its WaveShaper and DWP products and the Flexgrid product was also highly commended in the Innovations and inventions category.
The black-tie presentation dinner was attended by 10 Finisar employees who are pictured with the award below.
All three Finisar winners on the night now advance to the national finals to be held in Canberra in November.
We are pleased to announce that Finisar recently received the 2010 Excellent Partner Award from Hitachi. Of the 200 companies that were eligible, only four suppliers received this award with Finisar as the only optical communications supplier. The most rewarding part is that we were recognized for providing innovative technology and flexible support – two items we continually strive to be the best at in our industry.
Thank you Hitachi for recognizing our efforts.
In case you haven’t heard the news…Finisar was ranked the 3rd most innovative technology company in America in a post featured on the Forbes blog that was written by contributor Haydn Shaughnessy. The top five technology companies he listed have been identified as those that scored highest on an objective basis – based on online references – as an innovator and/or prized for its new products. In the article, Haydn (who is currently the senior editor at Innovation Management) had the following to say about Finisar:
“…There’s a deeper vein of innovation running through the companies that supply the infrastructure to the new economy. They’re not so well known but they deserve recognition…[Finisar] maker of optics subsystems for LAN, WAN, MANs is consistently referenced as an innovator.”
We are honored to have had our efforts recognized by Haydn and featured on the Forbes blog. As Haydn explains in the article, he gave these ranking to companies who are consistently referenced online as being innovative, creative or best in class. At Finisar, we are constantly trying to push the envelope and offer our customers the best products possible. So here’s a big thank you for the acknowledgement and support to Haydn, our customers and all of you!
You can read the article in its entirety on the Forbes blog here: “Which Are The Five Most Innovative Tech Companies in America?”
Award, Out of His Depth, Uncategorized | Simon Poole | 
January 25, 2012 6:57 pm | 
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