In the UK Ministry of Defence if you are responsible for IT projects you use a mandated methodology called PRINCE to manage the project. One of the key aspects of the methodolgy is that there are regular meetings between the Users (The intended Customer) the Technical Team (Who provide the system) and The Project Management Team who mange the project. These meetings occur at many levels. The benefit are that problems, flaged up as exception reports, can be identified at the earliest opportunity and worked on to an all informed project team.. Such methodologies can be tedious to run and mechanistic, with all the product and end of stage sign off meetings and due process but nonetheless the methodology is essential for quality and delivery of the intended products on time, to specification and cost.

Based on Eileen's recent posts it occurs to me that the presence of a Customer's VP level Executive on a Company's control Board indicates that there is a contract being delivered, which will have a distinct project plan with a clear timeframe and that there is a product being produced to the customer specification and to a given time frame and cost. In my book the TRAB amounts to a project control process not unlike the PRINCE methodology I was once very familiar with many moons ago back in the nineties employed as a Weapons Staff Officer for weapons read computers..

So to the news starved dissapppointed I say just how much hand holding and reassurance do you need to confirm that you have made one what will prove to be one of the wisest investments choices of your life.

The overly optimistic like myself are frequently asked to get real and wait for the facts to emerge, I say the reality is that all the facts you need to know are embodied in the process underway that are being controlled by the TRAB, This project management tool was set up to manage an established key business relationship, a relationship that is not new, surely we all heard the asides and hints from PC when he was the interim CEO and even GT at times back at the Empire Club event and very likely dates back three years or so.

So please let us accept that PC is not a pathological liar, as some on this board would have us believe, he is an experienced, shrewd business director who likes to deliver projects, he will understand the need for control methodologies and he set up the TRAB, possibly even at the request of the customer to adopt a specific Project Management Methodology which they wished as part of the relationship. They are picky.

Another relality is the confidence displayed by POET management at the AGM and the recent tour to broadcast POET advantages to Platinum Investors worldwide. That confidence comes not from hope but from achievement, because they know what we cannot yet know, of the full knowledge of a new working relationship and its positive developments, whcih by necessity must be held back from News Reports and for good reasons, as we learned this week. Yes it realy is a case of no news is good news and no point in fretting.

Another reality is that POET would not have let the relationship inplied by the TRAB be known unless it was intended that we as shareholders should be thrown a fillet of hope to sustain us during what was inevitably going to be a period of silence Considering the time of the TRAB announcement, a significant amount of development will now have been completed. From my experience of projects Synopsys programs and POET's technical input, the design phase of our customers project could well be completed by now and the manufacturing stage geared up for prototype and eventual production. There will inevitably be key go/no go check points on route e.g. to establish that POET process is capable of supporting mass manufacture. It is entirely possible that this project is not occuring at a POET site but at the customers and that it is not POET led but a customer led project in all probability involving POET staff assigned for coordination purposes (PG & LS cpme to mind. To me this relationship has the hallmark of a exclusive arrangement which is why POET can be left to individually focus on VCSEL and the communications vertical whilst our partner focuses his side of POET development elsewhere.

In effect POET is working towards a big bang entry into the IC world. We are keeping our powder dry so that that the effect will be to propel PTK to a NASDAQ listing. I cannot say when with any confidence but given the build up of expectation implied by the briefing tour it could well be after Q1 when a VCSEL prototype is produced confirming the ability to mass manufacture.

Take heed that the TRAB announcemnt is the clearest evidence of a deal with a customer and the production of a product, other than VCSEL in my view, the confirmation given by Mikael White of its existance and Tony Blevins participation is of great importance and that its significance as part of a project control methodology confirms a custome, a project and a product.

sula