New leader
Zarcone has been at the head of the instrumentation firm for about a year, and one of his tasks will be to make sure that development leads to commercialization in a timely fashion.
“These guys would be testing until the end of time, but occasionally you have to launch something commercially,” he quipped. “But the neat thing is they will test it every possible way because most of the time they're proving it to themselves. Calibration standards and the reliability of these instruments are phenomenal, and it's because of the way we look at rheology. We just love the testing and the market, and the data is something that is extremely important to us.”
He brought a varied background to the job, starting with EPDM and followed by a time in plastics, a stint working with coatings, a job running a small private equity chemical company, and then onto his post at Alpha. He said he took the position because he loves the intellectual property of the Akron-based unit of Roper Industries Inc.'s Dynisco business.
Besides upgrading its product lineup, he said Alpha also will look at bringing its technology to markets other than rubber or tires—basically anything that cures.
What he liked about Alpha was its great engineering work and the fact it wouldn't shy away from anything different or new. “I think the company had been a little stagnant for awhile,” he said. “I found a wonderful global team. A good portion of our business is the service and calibration. We have field support engineers everywhere in the world.”