Ciena's Tom Mock reflects on a career in telecom

It has been a strange week for Tom Mock. Not only is it his last at Ciena, after working for the company for 18 years, it has also been abnormally quiet since many of his colleagues are away at the OFC show in Los Angeles. 

Working for one technology company for so long may be uncommon, says Mock, but not at Ciena: the CTO has clocked 20 years while the CEO boasts 15 years. 

Tom Mock: “I’m about ready to go do something else.”

Mock studied electrical engineering and was at Scientific Atlanta running a product development group before joining Ciena where he crossed over from engineering to marketing. “I’ve been in telecom pretty much my entire career, 35 years worth of telecom,” says Mock. “I’m about ready to go do something else.” 

A work colleague says that if there is one word that describes Mock, it is decency: “He has been a key role model of the ‘do the right thing’ culture at Ciena.”

Mock joined Ciena days before the company went public in 1997. He experienced the optical bubble of 1999-2000 and the bust that followed, and just when he thought the company had put that ‘nuclear winter’ behind it, Ciena endured the 2008 global financial crisis.        

Now he leaves Ciena as senior vice president of corporate communications. A role, he says, that involves communicating the company's value proposition to the investment community and media, while helping Ciena’s sales staff communicate the company’s brand. The role also involves explaining the significance of the company’s technology: “It is great we can do 16-QAM [quadrature amplitude modulation] on optical, but why is it important?"  

When Mock joined Ciena, optical technology in the form of dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) was starting to be deployed. “You could go to a service provider and say, look, I can increase the capacity of your network by a factor of 16 just by swapping out the bits at the end of your fibre route,” he says. 

I remember sitting at my desk looking at stock prices and market capitalisations and realising that a start-up called Corvis ... had a market capitalisation larger than Ford Motor Company

The optical bubble quickly followed. The internet was beginning to change the world, and large enterprises were taking advantage of communication services in new ways. And with it came the inflated expectation that bandwidth demand would grow through the roof. As a result, optical communications became the hottest technology around. 

"I remember sitting at my desk looking at stock prices and market capitalisations and realising that a start-up called Corvis, a competitor of ours started by one of the guys that founded Ciena, Dave Huber, had a market capitalisation larger than Ford Motor Company,” says Mock. Ford was the second largest auto manufacturer in the world at the time.

Yet despite all the expected demand for - and speculation in - bandwidth, conversations with Ciena’s customers revealed that their networks were lightly loaded. The inevitable shake-out, once it came, was brutal, particularly among equipment makers. In the end, all that capacity placed in the network was needed, but only from 2006 as the cloud began to emerge and enterprises started making greater use of computing. 

“The one positive that came out of the bubble was that a lot of key technologies that enabled things that happened in the late 2000s were developed in that time,” says Mock.

Ciena made several acquisitions during the optical boom, and has done so since; some successful, others less so. Mock says that with most of the good ones, the technology and the market didn't overlap much with Ciena’s. 

Speculation didn't work well for the industry in terms of building infrastructure, and it probably doesn't work well in terms of acquisitions.  

One acquisition was Cyras Systems for $2.6 billion in 2000, a company developing 10 Gigabit multi-service provisioning platforms and add/ drop multiplexers. But so was Ciena. “That was one example that didn't work so well but if I look at the one that is going the best - Nortel MEN - that was a place where we didn't have as much technology and market overlap,” he says. That makes streamlining products easier and less disruptive for customers. 

“The other thing that is important in a good acquisition is a very good understanding of what the end objective is,” he says. “Speculation didn't work well for the industry in terms of building infrastructure, and it probably doesn't work well in terms of acquisitions.”  

Making sure the company cultures fit is also key. “In any of these technology acquisitions, it is not just about buying products and markets, it is about buying the capabilities of a workforce,” says Mock. It is important that the new workforce remains productive, and the way that of done is to make sure the staff feel an important part of the company, he says.

Mock highlights two periods that he found most satisfying at Ciena. One was 2006-2008 before the global economic crisis. Ciena was back of a sound financial footing and was making good money. “There was a similar feeling a year to 18 months after the Nortel acquisition” he says. “The integration had been successful, the people were all pointing in the same direction, and employee morale was pretty high.”           

You hear about white boxes in the data centre, there are areas in the network where that is going to happen.

What Mock is most proud of in his time at Ciena is the company’s standing. “We do a perception study with our customers every year to 18 months and one of things that comes back is that people really trust the company,” he says. “Our customers feel like we have their best interest at heart, and that is something we have worked very hard to do; it is also the sort of thing you don't get easily.”

Now the industry is going through a period of change, says Mock. If the last 10-15 years can be viewed as a period of incremental change, people are now thinking about how networks are built and used in new ways. It is about shifting to a model that is more in tune with on-demand needs of users, he says: “That kind of shift typically creates a lot of opportunity.” Networks are becoming more important because people are accessing resources in different places and the networks need to be more responsive. 

For Ciena it has meant investing in software as more things come under software control. The benefits include network automation and reduced costs for the operators, but it also brings risk. “There are parts of the infrastructure that are likely to become commoditised,” says Mock. “You hear about white boxes in the data centre, there are areas in the network where that is going to happen.”

We both came from small-town, working-class families. Over the years we have probably been more successful that we ever thought we would be, but a lot of that is due to people helping us along the way.  

If this is a notable period, why exit now? “It’s a good time for me,” he says. “And there were some things that my wife and I wanted to start looking at.” Mock’s wife retired two years ago and both are keen to give something back. 

“We both came from small-town, working-class families,” he says. “Over the years we have probably been more successful that we ever thought we would be, but a lot of that is due to people helping us along the way.”  

Mock and his wife were their families’ first generation that got a good professional education. “One of the things that we have taken on board is helping others gain that same sort of opportunity,” he says. 

“I’m excited for Tom but will miss having him around,” says his colleague. “Hopefully, in his next phase, he will make the rest of the world a little more decent as well.”