| Optical Network Vendor of the Year: Ciena |
Anup Changaroth, Ciena's director for portfolio marketing in Asia Pacific, talks about the key industry trends the company has capitalized on to drive growth.
There are three major trends. First, the continued massive demand for network capacity at lower costs - this is where Ciena's coherent 40G and 100G solutions have had significant impact. Customers also need to improve network availability and resilience and they need to lower network operations costs through automation. In both these areas our intelligent switching solutions have had a major impact.
How do you see these changing?
The above challenges will continue to remain key issues in 2012 and in fact are exacerbated as networks and applications continue to evolve into the cloud paradigm, and network connectivity and capacity become even more mission-critical.
What do you see as your biggest challenges?
One of the biggest challenges we see is in the impact that the global economy might have in capital spending among service providers and enterprise customers. Fortunately, Ciena's solutions specialize in bringing significant economic value to customers, so our challenge will be in educating customers of our value.
How is Ciena working with telcos to improve the cost model of their infrastructure?
We're addressing their cost models in a number of ways. Firstly, through continued reduction in the cost for transporting bits. Over the last couple of years, Ciena has had a track record of significant reducing cost-per-bit for transport with coherent DWDM solutions of 40G, 100G and soon even higher speeds.
And secondly, through intelligent network automation, specifically the implementation of control-plane technologies within the photonic and optical switching layers, we're able to significant lower operating costs, while improving network availability and resilience, and introducing new revenue generating service capabilities.