Ciena strengthens its commitment to India!

Mike Aquino,
Senior VP, Global Field Organization,
Ciena Corporation

With the recent acquisition of Nortel, strong market momentum and inauguration of their Mumbai office, Ciena has further strengthened their commitment and presence in the Indian market. Mike Aquino, Senior Vice-President, Global Field Organization, Ciena Corporation, sees market trends in the next 12-15 months revolving around several key areas like advent of 3G and its sustenance, making network more reliable, launching advanced services to enterprises and upgrading capacity on submarine networks. “We believe that the total market opportunity over the next three years in India is over $3 billion, with their particular markets growing at ~15%.”

Aquino adds, “Ciena holds the #1 market share in optical networking in North America and #3 globally. In India, Ciena is the leader in coherent 40G/100G solutions and intelligent control plane networks. Our competition varies depending on the application, but we generally find ourselves competing with the other global top tier players.” 

Ciena considers its strength in delivering high-capacity, coherent transport (40G/100G) solutions for applications such as metro, long-haul and submarine transport - allowing network operators to quadruple capacity without the need for new fiber deployments or complex network re-engineering. The two big pillars of strength are its automated OTN switching combined with control plane software for better resiliency, faster provisioning (time-to-market); greater network availability and lower costs and Carrier Ethernet for mobile backhaul and business Ethernet services.

Ciena's technology investment has given the Indian market an impressive toolkit built to solve critical network problems while allowing their customers to create new and differentiated services to capture market share. “In India, we are focussed on implementing network convergence strategies for our customers that enable new services to be created faster and provide a better end-user experience,” elaborates Aquino.

The key issues faced by operators globally are backbone capacity upgrades to keep up with the network traffic growth, both in terrestrial and submarine networks. And based on his experience, Aquino feels that the Indian operators are faced with similar issues to the global carrier landscape. With the nationwide rollouts of 3G services, the Indian operators are focussed on creating cost-effective backhaul architecture for mobile networks and upgrading core network capacity to accommodate the traffic growth that is expected.

Further, Ciena has announced the strategic evolution of its packet-optical portfolio designed to enable intelligent infrastructures using advanced silicon, software and switching technologies. With these new platform configurations, Ciena's market-leading intelligent switching, optical control plane and coherent optics combine to provide the most economical way to support existing and emerging services over a network that is efficient, resilient and differentiated. By integrating these innovations across multiple packet-optical products, Ciena provides its customers with a complete, applications-optimized portfolio that offers maximum flexibility for their next-generation core and metro networks.

“Ciena has invested over $150 million (since 2007) in the Indian market through a variety of initiatives. We see the Indian market as strategic both from a product development and product deployment perspective and we continue to invest in India,” he concludes.

For more contact: 
beenish@varindia.com