Creating Communications for Harsh Environments

Creating Communications for Harsh Environments

February 2005
By Quinne Bryant
The Business Journal of Tri-Cities Tennessee / Virginia

In less than a year and a half, Protokraft, LLC has already shipped out a first generation prototype of one of its products, and expects to be in full-scale production late this year.  The company designs and manufactures high-speed optoelectronic components and subsystems for military and industrial harsh environment networking equipment.

Protokraft shipped units late last year to a U.S. Army facility "as a proof of concept of a radical type of technology" says company co-founder and sales manager Bob Scharf.  "These units are for one of their prototypes for an upgrade for a new missile .  Then in April or May, if everything goes well, we'll ship a different product -  redesign the whole product to incorporate certain other details for exactly what the second generation will look like.  If that works, it will go into production sometime in late 2005.  When they start upgrading the missile platform, probably sometime in 2006, we'll be talking about a fairly large order for a small company like ours."

Scharf brings a great deal of experience with military products to Protokraft, which is one of the reasons the company has focused on the military as a target market, he says.  "We're starting out with the military because they are usually involved in some of the toughest environments, although there are some industries that get into environments that are more severe than the military's," added Scharf.  "We felt that one of the remaining under-served markets was this whole area of high-performance electronics in harsh environments.  And in developing components, we got called in to certain projects by the military, or by their contractors, where they had a need for functions that weren't available."

Scharf and his partner, engineering manager Randy Lord, have had a long association in business together.  "It's gone on for about 15 years with several different companies and venues," he says.  "Our original intention was to do something slightly different even than what we're doing right now.  Like all ventures, however, your business plan changes when it has its first contact with the market."

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"Our business process that we've developed is a little different than most people's when they get started," adds Scharf.  "We start out with a concept, and we let our customers help us evolve it into something that really is in demand.  People are calling us and saying, "I can't find something that does this.  Can you develop this for me?'  They've pushed us in a completely different direction, and the same thing continues to happen as our contacts drag us into opportunities and show us, "That's a nice idea, but what I really want is...' We're quite open to that.

"You have to find a way, though, to balance what your customers want with what you can do," he says.  "To a great extent, that comes from experience and knowing what can't be done right now technologically.  What we're starting with are standard military connector interfaces that are used in every military platform.  The military has taken those configurations, and because they have to be sealed and vibration-resistant, they've migrated to a certain subset.  We've taken the standard functions that would have been embedded in the box, and we've embedded them in the connector."

Protokraft' s expertise,  says Scharf, is as a sort of project manager in integrating multiple technologies that customers would ordinarily have to implement themselves.  "Our expertise is in finding all the right devices," he says.  "We package them all together in really unique ways.  We start out with a raw, unfulfilled concept, and then we let the customers push us in the direction that they want."