“We will bring 400G in 2012”

Gary B Smith has been Ciena’s CEO for the last 11 years. Prior to his current role, Smith has held various positions like chief operating officer, senior vice president (worldwide sales), and vice president (international sales). He has served as vice president, sales and marketing for both Intelsat and Cray Communications. Smith is also a member of President Obama’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. He currently serves on the board of directors for Avaya and Commvault Systems and is the commissioner of the Global Information Infrastructure Commission.

Smith is a broadband ambassador for the Internet Innovation Alliance and participates in initiatives at the Center for Corporate Innovation. Speaking to VOICE&DATA, Smith talked about: Trends in Indian telecom, Ciena’s strategy for India, R&D, local manufacturing, engagements with RIL, and enterprise strategy. Excerpts—

president and CEO, Ciena

What are some of the trends in the telecom space and what’s your India strategy?

There are 3 mega trends in the telecom space. First is mobility and it is not mobile phone only, but proliferation of all kinds of devices. Second is the phenomena of virtualization and third is M2M which is nascent in nature and is outside the area of mobile phone. Most of the demands are willing to move through, but some demands like virtualization have not yet started.

Looking at the India opportunity for the last seven years, Ciena is a great fit. The value positioning specifically in terms of growth of network architecture, inflexion point, and regulatory challenges opens up new opportunities in terms of network modernization. The network support trends, convergence, and multiservice network have resulted in having a resilient fiber network across the country and all this opens up a new opportunity for Ciena.

We have around 500 employees in India and we are looking to continue to expand our center of excellence of software engineering and global competency center. With more and more network architecture being software based, we see India as a key growth market for Ciena and we will continue to expand our India competency center. The India center is also the largest R&D center outside of North America.

What is Ciena’s role in creating a nextgeneration network in the country?

One of the key things in terms of creating a broadband network is a good network architecture. From customer experience point of view, the new applications should have the right kind of network and the right kind of intelligence. One cannot provide the right capacity, at the right place, and at the right time if they do not have the intelligence. So, there is a fundamental shift in the mindset of service providers.

The company has always envisioned an intelligent network and made lot of investment in the last ten years in terms of converged network, true multi-service network, and high resilient network. In many ways, Ciena is extremely well