Ciena’s campus is once again alive and kicking with approximately 70 customers making the trip to Ottawa, Canada, after a three-year break due to Covid-19. It's all part of the company's Vectors event which runs from May 23 to June 14 and provides the vendor with feedback and insight into tech trends, customer needs and demands.
During Vectors this year, customers will visit for demos, tours and presentations on Ciena’s solutions, including private 5G networking gear, a robot named Ironman that rolls around campus delivering things thanks to a private 5G network, liquid cooling for data centers, 5G slicing software from Blue Planet and lots more.
Silverlinings flew to Ottawa yesterday to meet with the company's executives. We got the inside scoop on big themes for Ciena (NYSE: CIEN) this year — sustainability, meeting capacity demands due to artificial intelligence, keeping up with compute power — from Rebecca Smith, chief marketing officer (pictured above), and Steven Alexander, CTO, and met with a bunch of other folks from across the organization.
My visit came one day before Ciena reported earnings for its second fiscal quarter of 2023, which ended April 29. It seemed to be good news all around with revenue of $1.13 billion up 19.3% year on year and net income of $57.7 million marking an increase from $38.9 million the year prior.
Within its Networking Platforms segment – which accounted for just over 80% of overall revenue – Converged Packet Optical sales jumped 25% to $784.5 million, while Routing and Switching was up 19.4% to $130.4 million. The vast majority of revenue (70%) came from the Americas, with the remaining 30% of sales split nearly evenly between the Asia Pacific and Europe, Middle East and Africa regions.
That said, investors seemed to be spooked by fiscal Q3 revenue guidance which came in below analyst expectations at $1 billion to $1.08 billion and a slight downward revision to Ciena’s full year revenue growth target. It said it now expects between 18% and 22% revenue growth, compared to the 20% to 22% range it previously outlined in its FQ1 report.
While we didn't get any insight into the finances in Ottawa, we did get our own personal tour from Helen Xenos, senior director, portfolio marketing, Converged Packet Optical.
Check out the pics below to see what we saw, and stay tuned for our interviews with Smith and Alexander.
Liquid cooling!
A demo of an early liquid cooling solution for the company’s routers and Waveserver interconnect platform. (Note that the cooling liquid is the color of Vulcan blood.)
1.6 Tb/s
An example of new optical line cards in the making — it can achieve speeds up to 1.6 Tb/s
The clean room
The clean room where the company develops its chips. This guy was looking at a chip through a microscope via a computer monitor.
The man behind the curtain
The advanced test bed area where the vendor tests out the digital signal processor algorithms for its transmitters and receivers based on silicon photonics and other materials. Here is where Charles Laperle, optical systems designer, sits. Laperle has been at the company for 27 years and tests state-of-the-art coherent digital signal processing algorithms even years before they are integrated into product. He sits behind a black curtain like the Wizard of Oz. No pics allowed.
Great spools of fiber!
Walls and walls of spools of fiber – over 100,000 kilometers of fiber to be exact in the Ottawa facility alone, said Xenos.
Meet Ironman
This robot roams the Ciena campus delivering all sorts of items, including food and beverages. It's connected to a private 5G network that the vendor has implemented in order to understand challenges that its customers may face when building their own networks, according to Remus Tan, director, product line management.
Design pride
The one big thing I really enjoyed about my visit to Ciena was that everyone was proud to show off their team's hard work — especially when it came to unique design and problem solving. For example, James Glover, director of product line management, Coherent Routing and Switching, gave us an up-close look at the way Ciena's WaveRouters are currently designed to help ease access, reduce power and control the thermal footprint in data centers. With this design, techs can access the systems in the front of the gear instead of having to go around to the back and remove fans to access cables. Plus this makes it easier to stack those infamous "pizza boxes," he noted. "This is one area where we have gotten feedback from our customers," said Glover. "We've gotten better and better at consolidating technology together but the hot spots are getting hotter and hotter." From a building perspective, there is no more space to add air conditioning in the ceiling, so Ciena needs to ensure their customers can distribute the [thermal] lode more efficiently and make the maintenance easier.
No secret in Ciena's SAOS and MCP
Anyone who has been in the comms space for a while knows the importance of the "single pane of glass" when it comes to network visibility. Silverlinings got a deep dive into Ciena's Service-aware Operational System (SAOS, pronounced "sauce"), which provides intelligence in the router, and its Manage, Control and Plan (MCP), which is the domain controller for the whole of the Ciena portfolio. According to John McKinnon, VP of development for the company's SDN Network Control and Planning Software, the company has 500 developers working on the MCP alone.
Again, this is just a glimpse of what we saw in Ottawa. Stay tuned for our interviews with Smith and Alexander.
Diana Goovaerts contributed to the reporting in this article.