In August 2005, Polatis of the UK merged with US firm - and SBIR involved - Continuum Photonics Inc with the latter becoming the US arm of the British firm. In May 2016, the firm was acquired by Swiss firm Huber-Suhner. Now with facilites in Bedford, MA, Cambridge in the UK and Krakow in Poland, Polatis technology enables huge data streams to be managed speedily, efficiently and securely, which in turn enables improved capacity utilisation in data centres and advanced data management in large telecom networks = area of strategic growth by HUBER+SUHNER, a Swiss firm. By enabling the efficient management of ever-increasing data volumes, optical switches are a key building block in the evolution towards software-defined networks. In contrast to conventional electrical/optical switches, pure optical switches like those from Polatis do not convert the signals but control them purely optically and therefore offer much higher performance. Polatis switches have faster switching speeds, outstanding reliability and the industrys lowest optical loss, Polatis recently launched the 384x384 optical circuit switch, which is the largest available optical circuit switch on the market, according to the compa