POLATIS at 25: An amazing combination of skills, experience, insights and innovation that has generated a lot of loyalty from customers

In June 2025, the POLATIS Business Unit at HUBER+SUHNER celebrated the 25^th anniversary of the original business’s foundation. We caught up with Robert Smith, Managing Director, to find out just what it means to the team in Cambridge, UK.

What does a 25-year milestone mean to you, and what would you say has stayed consistent in that time?

In an industry where so many start ups have come and gone it means we must have been doing something right to get to 25!

Joking aside, we have always believed passionately in the strength and benefits of our technology and are privileged because so many customers have trusted us over the years to serve their often mission-critical application needs.

We have remained committed to our Cambridge location, recognising the benefits of being part of a technology ecosystem and having access to an extraordinary talent pool.

We have had a very stable team and we still have several team members who have been with the business for twenty-plus years. The longest-serving has completed over 24 years while one of our very earliest employees could no longer resist the allure and rejoined us in the last couple of years. The ability to maintain a core team for continuity while bringing in new skills as the team has grown has been vital in the development of our core technology and products.

There has always been a thread of innovation running through the company’s history and that has allowed us to stand out in the marketplace.

Robert Smith, Managing Director of HUBER+SUHNER Polatis

What are the key values that have shaped POLATIS through these years, and how do you foster them amongst the team at large?

Above all we have promoted a team culture that values collaboration and mutual accountability. We have sought to harness the problem-solving abilities of our team and to encourage them always to be curious as they developed the next new product. We go the extra mile to deliver for our customers and have developed many customised solutions to meet their complex application requirements.

Happily this meant we were already very well aligned with HUBER+SUHNER’s values when we were acquired but the work of fostering our values is never finished and we strive to make sure we live them every day. In the interests of transparency we hold regular Town Hall meetings to report on the state of the business and it is an important part of the induction of new employees to ensure they understand our core values.

Given that a major portion of our team is now in Poland, with smaller groups in the USA and India, it really is important to us to make sure there are regular exchanges between the various sites to encourage that collaboration and grow trust and confidence in each other.

Could you describe a moment of critical change or turning point for POLATIS that has significantly shaped its future?

From a corporate perspective our acquisition by HUBER+SUHNER in 2016 is of course highly significant. Like all start ups we had been through several rounds of raising investment but the acquisition has enabled us to scale the business, the latest example of which is the new factory that opened in Poland in early June, representing a step change in our manufacturing capacity. It also helps when negotiating with global customers to have the backing of a highly-respected international company such as HUBER+SUHNER.

On the product front, the team has consistently delivered on developing the “next biggest switch” by which we mean increasing the number of optical ports available for customers to connect their networks through. The launch of the POLATIS 7000 Series with a maximum matrix size of 384x384 optical ports has enabled us to address the growing data center market where large numbers of connections are required and this has continued as we build our position in the AI Data Center market with a new generation of large optical circuit switches.

How has the market changed from the year 2000 and what does the future hold?

In 2000 we were one of a whole group of companies exploring the technology of optical circuit switching. Most of them fell by the wayside but we continued to prosper and grow, and to evangelise the benefits of the technology. We have provided solutions to customers in many markets while always looking for truly mass deployment opportunities.

Over the past three to four years optical circuit switching has become the hot topic in the networking world, particularly with the burgeoning demands of AI. We are well positioned to ride that wave of demand with a mature technology and boosted by the new manufacturing site we opened on June 12. As we enter our second quarter of a century, we are very optimistic about what the future holds for the business.