A sneak peek at Ciena’s new $100M Kanata campus
Buildings aim to balance employees’ privacy with the need to collaborate
It seems every serious tech company is doing it — Apple, Google, Nvidia, LinkedIn and, soon, Amazon.
They’re building, or have already built, vast new operations centres that celebrate the companies’ brands and provide unique working space to encourage productive employees.
Ottawa is no stranger to the trend. On Wednesday, 1,600-plus employees of Ciena Corp. will celebrate their shift from multiple locations around Ottawa to the just-completed campus alongside Terry Fox Drive in North Kanata. The 28-month construction project was the most significant involving a tech campus since the 2000 boom.
While Ciena is based in Hanover, Md., the new campus in Kanata houses nearly one-third of the company’s total staff and serves as the global headquarters for R&D. It’s a status that reflects Ciena’s acquisition of Nortel’s optical products group in 2010.
In all, the new campus consists of three main buildings — a 170,600-square-foot office tower built by Black-Berry but never fully occupied; and two new structures built for Ciena and comprising 254,300 square feet.
Construction costs for the two new buildings alone topped $100 million and Ciena incurred a small fortune in additional expenses to outfit all three buildings and transfer employees. The company last month recorded an additional liability of $6.6 million to reflect “unfavourable lease commitments and relocations” related to the shift of employees from the former Nortel site.
Ciena recently offered the Citizen a sneak preview of its new campus.
David Baines, the company’s senior director of global facilities & property operations said the workplace design flowed from a companywide exercise several years ago to establish a consistent feel for Ciena’s offices around the globe — and to balance employees’ need for privacy as well as to collaborate. The result in Kanata is a combination of familiar office cubicles, along with plenty of areas meant to encourage teamwork — coffee shops, kitchen areas, outdoor patios and a basketball court.
The walls throughout the buildings are softened by the generous use of personal photos and collages contributed by the employees, showing vacations, hobbies and other interests having nothing to do with the business of building communications networks.
The overall effect is one of warmth, quiet efficiency and a certain modesty. The facilities lack the out-of-this-world ambition, architecturally speaking, of Apple’s stunning new headquarters. But then many of the people who work here still remember when Nortel ran the show, when shortly before the telecom crash that corporation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new facilities that would not be used for more than a decade.
After years of great effort to integrate Nortel’s former optical products group, Ciena is now solidly profitable. The design of its new R&D headquarters suggests it intends to stay that way.