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MARLBORO - The loudest thing about Harold E. Charnley may be the roar of his deep purple Harley-Davidson as he thunders into the Artel Video Systems Inc. parking lot. He makes the 20-mile run from his home in Littleton to Artel's offices in Marlboro, where signs for high-technology companies sprout from the low-slung brick buildings that hug the rolling hills.
Today is the last day of yet another quarter that improved on the last, and Charnley strides quietly through the corridors of the video switching and transmission company, smiling and greeting employees whose shorts, polo shirts and broad smiles may have as much to do with the relaxed atmosphere the company espouses as with the company-wide vacation week they are hours away from.
In a conference room, he sits down and sips the cup of coffee he says he needs after a 2 a.m. marathon earlier in the week. His vacation destination is Maine where he'll go on the boat he and his wife, Mary, and 4-and-a-half-year-old son, Steven, live on during the weekends they spend off Newcastle, N.H., from April 1 to Thanksgiving.
TRANSFORMATION
Reflective, deliberate and soft-spoken, Artel's lanky 38-year- old president and chief executive officer is ready to talk about how his company was transformed from a division to be divested after two successive mergers to a company growing by virtue of an acquisition of its own.
"It's a great story," he said. "I love to tell it."
And in a way, it is a love story.
In 1993, while working for Chipcom Corp. in Southboro, Charnley's mission was to assess a small video transmission segment of Artel Communications Corp., which Chipcom had just acquired to expand its switching line. Video transmission products didn't fit Chipcom's product mix, so Charnley was charged with deciding whether to sell or close Artel's seven-employee video division. Although founded in 1981 as a video transmission equipment maker, Artel had evolved into an ethernet switching company.
"As I talked to a couple of these seven people, I got the sense that there was a real business opportunity here and a real market," he said. "It was fiber optics and it was telecommunications and it was video. I didn't know anything about any of those, but those...