How important is the annual International Institute of Connector and Interconnect Technology (IICIT) Symposium? This year, even a looming hurricane couldn't cancel it. "The IICIT is the judge of how innovative new products are, and what value they will bring to market," says Jay Betker, director of Business Development for ITT Industries, Cannon, who flew to Florida for this year's Symposium despite the presence of Hurricane Isabel sitting off the coast. The hurricane never hit Florida, but Betker blew away the attendees with his presentation on the future of fiber optic interconnect technology and Cannon's cutting-edge Photonics High Density (PHD) optical interconnect technology. In fact, he walked away with half of all the hardware given out by Symposium organizers - earning one award for best presentation and another for best technical paper. Betker showed that in today's cutting-edge systems the use of copper as the media of choice to move high-speed digital data is rapidly evolving to optical media solutions. "For cost, weight and data security reasons, there is a mass migration from copper-based high-speed data to optical fibers," he says. "We are seeing this in nearly every new telecom and military platform or system. His paper specifically addressed how the interconnect industry has been slow to respond to this fundamental market technology shift, and showed that ITT Industries has taken the lead in responding to the challenge with our PHD optics offering. The presentation positioned Cannon as a forward-thinking company with a very important audience. The Symposium not only attracts technical and sales people from the interconnect industry, it also brings in industry suppliers and Original Equipment Manufacturers like Lucent, IBM, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop. "From a business standpoint, this gives us great exposure," says Betker. "Our PHD optical interconnect technology and product offering was released a year ago to the general market. We've already achieved nearly $2 million in bookings, and expect a steep growth rate going forward. This can only help."			Jay Betker and Cannon's PHD optical interconnect technology.