After three decades of shaping optical networking technology, Steve Alexander is stepping down as Ciena's Chief Technology Officer (CTO).
His journey, from working on early optical networking systems to helping to implement AI as part of Ciena’s products, mirrors the evolution of telecommunications itself.
The farewell
"As soon as you say, 'Hey guys, you know, there's an end date', certain things start moving," says Alexander reflecting on his current transition period. "Some people want to say goodbye, others want more of your time."
After 30 years of work, the bulk of it as CTO, Alexander is ready to reclaim his time, starting with the symbolic act of shutting down Microsoft Outlook.
"I don't want to get up at six o'clock and look at my email and calendar to figure out my day,” he says.
His retirement plans blend the practical and the fun. The agenda includes long-delayed home projects and traveling with his wife. "My kids gave us dancing lessons for a Christmas present, that sort of thing," he says with a smile.
Career journey
The emergence of the erbium-doped fibre amplifier shaped Alexander's career.
The innovation sparked the US DARPA's (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) interest in exploring all-optical networks, leading to a consortium of AT&T, Digital Equipment Corp., and MIT Lincoln Labs, where Alexander was making his mark.
"I did coherent in the late 80s and early 90s, way before coherent was cool," he recalls. The consortium developed a 20-channel wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) test bed, though data rates were limited to around 1 Gigabit-per-second due to technology constraints.
"It was all research with components built by PhD students, but the benefits for the optical network were pretty clear,” he says.
The question was how to scale the technology and make it commercial.
A venture capitalist's tip about a start-up working on optical amplifiers for cable TV led Alexander to Ciena in 1994, where he became employee number 12.
His first role was to help build the optical amplifier. "I ended up doing what effectively was the first kind of end-to-end link budget system design," says Alexander. "The company produced its first product, took it out into the industry, and it's been a great result since."
The CTO role
Alexander became the CTO at Ciena at the end of the 1990s.
A CTO needs to have a technology and architecture mindset, he says, and highlights three elements in particular.
The first includes such characteristics as education and experience, curiosity, and imagination. Education is essential, but over time, it is interchangeable with experience. "They are fungible," says Alexander.
Another aspect is curiosity, the desire to know how things work and why things are the way they are. Imagination refers to the ability to envisage something different from what it is now.
"One of the nicest things about the engineering skill set, whatever the field of engineering you're in, is that with the right tools and team of people, once you have the idea, you can make it happen," says Alexander.
Other aspects of the CTO's role are talking, travelling, trouble-making, and tantrum throwing. "Trouble-making comes from the imagination and curiosity, wanting to do things maybe a little bit different than the status quo," says Alexander.
And tantrums? "When things get really bad, and you just have to make a change, and you stomp your foot and pound the table," says Alexander.
The third aspect a CTO needs is being in the “crow's nest”, the structure at the top of a ship's mast: "The guy looking out to figure out what's coming: is it an opportunity? A threat? And how do we navigate around it," says Alexander.
Technology and business model evolution
Alexander’s technological scope has grown over time, coinciding with the company’s expanding reach to include optical access and its Blue Planet unit.
“One of the reasons I stayed at the company for 30 years is that it has required a constant refresh,” says Alexander. “It's a challenge because technology expands and goes faster and faster.”
His tenure saw the transformation from single-channel Sonet/ SDH to 16-channel WDM systems. But Alexander emphasizes that capacity wasn't the only challenge.
"It's not just delivering more capacity to more places, the business model of the service providers relies on more and more levels of intelligence to make it usable," he says.
The gap between cloud operators' agility and that of the traditional service providers became evident during Covid-19. "The reason we're so interested in software and Blue Planet is changing that pretty big gap between the speed at which the cloud can operate and the speed at which the service provider can operate."
Coherent optics
Ciena is shipping the highest symbol rate coherent modem, the WaveLogic 6 Extreme. This modem operates at up to 200 gigabaud and can send 1.6 terabits of data over a single carrier.
Alexander says coherent optics will continue to improve in terms of baud rate and optical performance. But he wonders about the desired direction the industry will take.
He marvels at the success of Ethernet whereas optical communications still has much to do in terms of standardization and interoperability.
There's been tremendous progress by the OIF and initiatives such as 400ZR, says Alexander: “We are way better off than we were 10 years ago, but we're still not at the point where it's as ubiquitous and standardised as Ethernet."
Such standardisation is key because it drives down cost.
“People have discussed getting on those Ethernet cost curves from the photonic side for years. But that is still a big hurdle in front of us,” he says.
AI's growing impact
It is still early days for AI, says Alexander, but there are already glimmers of success. Longer term, the impact will likely be huge.
AI is already having an impact on software development and on network operations.
Ciena's customers have started by looking to do simple things with AI, such as reconciling databases. Service providers have many such data stores: an inventory database, a customer database, a sales database, and a trouble ticket database.
"Sometimes you have a phone number here, an email there, a name elsewhere, things like a component ID, all these different things,” he says. ”If you can get all that reconciled into a consistent source of knowledge, that's a huge benefit."
Automation is another area that typically requires using multiple manual systems. There are also research papers appearing where AI is being used to design photonic components delivering novel optical performance.
AI will also impact the network. Humans may still be the drivers but it will be machines that do the bulk of the work and drive traffic.
“If you are going to centralize learning and distributed inferencing, it's going to have to be closer to the end user,” says Alexander.
He uses a sports application as an example as to what could happen.
"If you're a big soccer/ football fan, and you want to see every goal scored in every game that was broadcast anywhere in the world in the last 24 hours, ranked in a top-10 best goals listing, that's an interesting task to give to a machine,” he says.
Such applications will demand unprecedented network capabilities. Data will need to be collected, and there will be a lot of machine-to-machine interactions to generate maybe a 10-minute video to watch.
"If you play those sorts of scenarios out, you can convince yourself that yes, networks are going to have lots of demand placed on them."
Personal Reflection
While Alexander won't miss his early morning Outlook checks, he'll miss his colleagues and the laboratory environment.
A Ciena colleague, paying tribute to Alexander, describes him as being an important steward of Ciena's culture. "He always has lived by the credo that if you care for your people, people will care for the company,” he says.
Alexander plans to keep up with technology developments, but he acknowledges that losing the inside view of innovation will be a significant change.
When people have asked him why he has stayed at Ciena, his always has answered the same way: "I joined Ciena for the technology but I stayed because of the people."
Further Information
Ciena's own tribute, click here