Have you ever been told something is impossible? Here at Clearfield, we recently dug into the topic of “Harnessing the Possible.” This is another way of saying that we must challenge the impossible.

There’s a great movie called “The Impossible” that’s currently in theaters. It’s about the triumph of the human spirit represented by a family who overcomes the unimaginable challenges of the devastation of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand.

Fortunately, most of us will never have to face such a daunting situation. But every day we do face seemingly impossible challenges. We may not always prevail, but we almost always emerge better for the experience.

Through 2012, Johnny Hill, our COO (and all around fiber master), challenged our development teams to do something that had never been done before.  He wanted to take scalability a step further and integrate slack storage into our Clearview Cassette architecture.  By doing so, every Clearview Cassette could truly stand alone as an independent fiber management device.  As a stand-alone device, conventional product design could be thrown out the window and the sheet metal (and its associated costs) would be eliminated.

The resulting product, Clearview Blue (along with the Blue Building Block) was introduced to market last fall. The response to date indicates that we are “on-target” – and early deployments in central offices and data centers are reducing the footprint by more than 40%.

A year ago, this would have been “impossible.” Today, it’s not only possible, it’s here in the form of FieldSmart FxHD.

Someone very special in my life signs every email with a quote from inventor, futurist and “2001: A Space Odyssey” author Arthur C. Clark. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I challenge you to find the magic in your technology. I’m very proud of Clearfield’s magicians!