What makes for a successful laser application

Industrial application of lasers are within several different niches. A few of these niches are so large that standard equipment are on the market. However, most applications are more or less custom designed.The industrial laser market is new, the market size is small, and therefore the systems suppliers do normally not pocess internal ressources for efficient application development, except for their key market segments.The industrial laser market is further characterized by the large divertisement in products: Is the optimum laser for a certain job a CO2- or a ND-YAG-laser? Ore perhaps a Copper Vapour Laser? Should the CO2-laser be a slow-flow-laser with excellent pulsing capability or a larger fast-axial-flow-laser?The choises are many.Imagin a morning in the office at the application laboratory in one of the largest laser companies. The daily mail has arrived and the 3 engineers has opened the 10 new letters with requests from their sales offices around the world. The requests are sorted in three equal sized stacks: One for straight forwards jobs, one for possible jobs and one for impossible or very difficult jobs. What will they do? They will of course try to demonstrate the feasability of their lasers on the straight forward jobs. And if every things goes perfect, they might even manage to make a good test of one of the possible jobs. But, they have some jobs laying over from yesterday, and they miss some optical components to be able to demonstrate some af these jobs correctly, and tommorrow there will get 10 new requests, so... Therefore, a successful laser application often requires more than a salesman.