In the 8 years we have been administering the Cabling Innovators Awards, we at Cabling Installation & Maintenance have emphasized that it is not exclusively a new-product award program. Newly developed products are encouraged and welcome, of course. But we also encourage entries that describe case histories and application stories, as well as value-added programs. Each year we’ve been fortunate to bestow awards upon this spectrum of participants, and this year is no exception. Wesco’s Utility Grade Infrastructure is an example of a value-added program that impressed our judging panel. Additionally, the use of Panduit products in Kawachinagano City, Japan’s school-system technology upgrade exemplifies the type of case study we’re fortunate to feature.
Nonetheless, products tend to dominate our awards program each year. But that doesn’t necessarily mean each product we honor is brand new. Take, for example, Retyz. Netconnex’s Retyz originally was developed for Boeing, to provide a releasable tie product that would cinch tight but release easily to avoid cutting the ties off the plane’s wiring. Retyz not only saved Boeing from the damage they endured with other cable ties that needed to be cut off in order to be removed; it also improved the efficiency of the wiring process. In all, Retyz saved Boeing more than $2 million annually in cut-cable damages. Retyz is releasable and reusable. It is tool-free and does not need to be trimmed; its design allows for an easy tuck of the strap for future use and expansion.
Retyz is not a new product, but may be new to you.
On the other hand, PulR is new to the industry. Developed by Francois Menard, PulR’s Cable Pulling Adapters for Fiber Optic Patch Cords is a solution to challenges faced by cable installation technicians when pulling patch cords through walls, conduits, floors, overhead ceilings, behind baseboards, and other challenging routes inside a building. The product is a pluggable cable pulling adapter that can be easily field installed and removed at the end of a preconnectorized SC cord. It facilitates easy and safe pulls of FTTx patch cords through three-eighths-inch-diameter holes. It is engineered to grip on the outer sheath of a 4.8-mm-diameter patch cord. A rope pulling eye can be screwed to the PulR Adapter to help pulling into a 9.5-mm-diameter conduit.
Cabling Installation & Maintenance’s Matt Vincent interviewed PulR’s Francois Menard for our podcast, which you can hear here.
The awards program also recognizes improvements to existing products or product lines. One example is Senko’s SN Uniboot Connector. Building on the market success of the SN, this series allows four SN or SN-MT connectors to be patched simultaneously in a single operation. It makes the SN connector faster and easier to mate and de-mate. The SN Uniboot provides immediate benefits to hyperscale data center operators that need to patch many thousands of fiber-optic connections within centralized patching fields.
Similarly, Belden has offered a product line called DCX for several years. This year, we recognize the DCX High-Density Fiber Cabling Infrastructure Solution, which supports fast, easy operation and management of fiber terminations without taking up lots of space, allowing end users to maximize square footage. It can handle large numbers of fiber cables, support fast MACs, and accommodate future increases in fiber connections without compromising on ease-of-use.
And Siemon's LightVerse Fiber Optic Cabling System is an entirely new portfolio of solutions. It is a fully integrated system of enclosures, plug-and-play modules, adapter plates, splice cassettes and splice trays, designed with the flexibility to adapt to nearly any network cabling and connectivity need. Designed on a unified platform approach, LightVerse allows a single, core set of enclosures to support wide-ranging fiber cabling applications and topologies across the data center, LAN, and IB/IoT environments.
So whether a product is brand new, new to a product portfolio, or just new to use in the ICT industry, if it exhibits sufficient innovation, you’ll find it recognized in our annual Cabling Innovators Awards program.