- Steve Alexander has been Ciena's main CTO for more than 30 years
- Before he retires, he's sharing some insights about the optical network landscape - past, present and future
- The landscape is changing with Nokia's purchase of Infinera and the boom of AI
Ciena’s long-time CTO Steve Alexander is retiring in January, but he’s got some thoughts about where the optical networking industry is now and where it’s headed before he, himself, heads off into retirement nirvana.
Alexander, who was employee number 15 at Ciena when it was founded in 1992, was part of the original crew that put the company on the map for pioneering dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), which became a critical technology for telcos to deploy internet connectivity.
“Foundational technologies of the internet have been developed at Ciena," Alexander said.
Fierce Network asked Alexander what he thought of the current state of the optical networking landscape, which is undergoing changes with Nokia’s imminent purchase of Infinera, the banning of Huawei in some parts of the world and the artificial intelligence (AI) boom with its ripple effects.
Of Infinera, Alexander noted that it’s “not nearly as big as Nokia.” He said, “Historically, if you go and look at the DNA of Nokia, it’s a lot of other companies together. Infinera had to get better scale. As technologies advance, they also get more expensive to produce.”
For its part, Nokia says the purchase of Infinera will increase the scale of its Optical Networks business by 75%, creating a business that can sustainably challenge the competition, which includes Ciena, Fujitsu and Cisco in the Western world and Huawei and ZTE in other geographies.
In fact, Huawei is still the largest optical networking vendor in the world, even though its equipment is banned in the U.S. and parts of Europe. But Alexander seemed to indicate that Huawei wasn’t too big of a competitive threat for Ciena because “Ciena doesn’t sell in every country where Huawei operates.”
Opportunities via AI
Nokia executives have been talking lately about a shift from the company’s traditional telco customer base into the lucrative hypercloud market, particularly related to AI.
On its Q3 2024 earnings this month Nokia’s CEO Pekka Lundmark said that telco is no longer the top growth market for Nokia. Instead, the company has turned its growth focus to data centers.
For its part, Ciena is also focused on providing high-capacity connections inside and around data centers. The company’s original customers were service providers. “But today, I’m thinking the cloud folks build networks that in many cases are more extensive and higher capacity than carriers,” Alexander said. “We’ve got thousands of customers: 80% of Tier 1 carriers and every major hyperscaler.”
Ciena recently said it was bringing to market a 1.6 Tbps Coherent-Lite pluggable to help cloud and data center providers cope with the expected growth in machine learning and AI traffic.
“The same solutions we applied to the long haul, middle mile and campus will become more applicable inside the data center,” Alexander said.
The way that Ciena pushes boundaries and continues to innovate is to make its products faster, smaller, more energy efficient and cheaper. He said in 1997 40 gigabits of optical photonics power occupied one full telco bay. And it took 10 of those bays to get 400 gigabits. Now, Ciena can provide that 400 gigabits in a pluggable the size of a person’s hand.
“You’ll always want to go faster and light up as much of the spectrum at once as possible,” said Alexander.
Getting into the broadband access biz
About two years ago, Ciena made the decision to get into the fiber access business for the last mile to homes and businesses.
“The decision to get into fiber access naturally follows the fact we can put 400 gig in the palm of your hand,” Alexander said. “That’s what the technology supports. That is a fundamental building block of broadband access; the ability to put terabits to a location, and split it out to residences and businesses.”
Ciena’s CTOs
Although Alexander has been the top CTO at Ciena, there are other CTOs who oversee different geographies, market verticals and large accounts. He said the CTO role is “one who comes in, not with a sales mind, but with a technology and architecture mindset to have conversations with customers."
Alexander said he doesn’t think that Ciena’s CEO Gary Smith is replacing Alexander’s role.