ANALYSIS: ENGINEERED MATERIAL & OPTOELECTRONIC COMPONENTS
‘It’s all about the ability to see around corners’
Antonio Castelo, EPIC’s Technology Manager for Bio-Medical and Lasers, talks to Dr Sanjai Parthasarathi, Chief Marketing Officer of Coherent – a global leader in engineered materials and optoelectronic components
What’s the background to your appointment as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Coherent? After graduating with a BTech in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, I moved to the US to pursue a Master’s degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Virginia. My career began in 1991, in Western Pennsylvania, and I worked on advanced materials at Concurrent Technologies Corporation, an applied scientific research institute, while simultaneously pursuing a PhD in Engineering Science at Penn State University. After completing my PhD,
I was recruited by Western Digital and relocated to Silicon Valley. Moving from R&D to a high-volume, 24/7 ultra-clean hi-tech production environment was quite a transition! Staying in the field of consumer electronics and data storage, I was inspired to join TeraStor, a start-up focused on a revolutionary near-field optical recording platform. There, in addition to my development role, I also managed partnerships and business development. In 2000, I made the transition to marketing when I joined Oplink Communications, a fibre optic components company, as Director of European Marketing. I was later promoted to run its largest product line. In 2003, I moved to Avanex, an optical networking systems manufacturer, and I ran its largest product lines. Then, in 2009, Avanex merged with
www.electrooptics.com
Bookham to form Oclaro and I stayed on in the combined company until 2013, when some businesses of Oclaro were acquired by II-VI Incorporated – a company headquartered in Western Pennsylvania. At II-VI, I ran product marketing and strategy as Vice-President for the Photonics Segment. In 2019, after II-VI’s acquisition of Finisar and the accompanying transformation, I had the distinct honour and privilege to be appointed II-VI’s first CMO. Following II-VI’s acquisition of Coherent and subsequent name change to Coherent Corp. in July 2022, I continued on as CMO of the combined company. My last 10 years at the firm have been a super-exciting journey of profound learning and experiences.
How did you find the transition from product development to manufacturing, then to product marketing and, finally, to the highest marketing role in the organisation, as CMO? It’s been a fascinating transition and career journey. At TeraStor, in addition to my development role, I served as both the technical and business liaison with our media development partners, who were large public companies in Japan and in the US. It was my responsibility to keep them enthused and invested in the programme. In addition to sharing my excitement about the market and its prospects, I had to clearly communicate technology progress and remaining challenges; this was when I realised the critical
‘Our fastest growth market is electronics, driven by the electrification of automobiles,’ says Coherent’s Sanjai Parthasarathi
importance of soft skills and communication. Then, when I first moved to a marketing leadership role in fibre optics, I learned that having a broad technical background and experience was especially important in marketing roles in high-tech companies... domain experience really is critical. It’s also almost impossible to be a deep technical expert in all of the products a large diversified company such as Coherent sells into. However, to develop a strong appreciation of the markets and their dynamics, and the product positions within them, it is critically important to understand and appreciate the underlying technology. At Coherent, we segment our markets into Industrial, Communications, Electronics and Instrumentation; and, within each group, we further
segment the market into verticals. I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work in all the market groups and almost all the verticals that Coherent focuses on.
Why was the legacy business that was Coherent an attractive acquisition? What was really exciting for us was that both companies had a 50-year legacy and culture of innovation centred around the use of technology to improve people’s lives. In addition to great cultural alignment, ‘legacy Coherent’ was, and always has been, the gold standard in lasers with unrivalled scale and breadth of product in multiple markets. Accordingly, it represented a great diversification opportunity for us, particularly in the industrial and instrumentation markets. We were also excited by the technology, product and market
May 2O24 Electro Optics 33
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Coherent
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