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.”

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Ciena adds software to enhance network control

Engineers at Ciena have developed software to provide service providers with greater control over their networks. The operators' customers will also benefit from the software control, using a web portal to meet their own networking needs. 

Source: Ciena

"Networks can become more dynamic," says Tom Mock, senior vice president, corporate communications at Ciena. "Operators can now offer more on-demand services." If much work has been done in recent years to make the network's lower layers dynamic, attention is turning to software to make the networks programmable, he says.

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Ciena launches the 8700 metro Ethernet-over-WDM platform

• The 8700 Packetwave is an Ethernet-over-DWDM platform 
• The 8700 is claimed to deliver double the Ethernet density while halving the power consumption and space required.

Source: Ciena

Ciena has launched the 8700 Packetwave platform that combines high-capacity Ethernet switching with 100 Gigabit coherent optical transmission.

The platform is designed to cater for the significant growth in metro traffic, estimated at between 30 and 50 percent each year, and the ongoing shift from legacy to Ethernet services.

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OFC 2014 industry reflections - Part 2

Ciena and Ovum comment on the noteworthy developments and trends following the recent OFC 2014 exhibition and conference. 

The high cost of 100 Gigabit Ethernet client modules has been a major disappointment to me as it has slowed adoption

Joe Berthold, Ciena

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Ciena uses software to dip into the photonic layer

Ciena has enhanced its control plane and line elements to enable software to control the optical networking layer. The additions are part of Ciena's OPn network architecture evolution to enable greater visibility and automation. "It is about putting software into a system to allow you to program the photonic line," says Michael Adams, vice president of product & technology marketing at Ciena.

"For an SDN controller to control a photonic line, we need to present it as a programmable layer. The infrastructure is now there to be programmed."

Michael Adams, Ciena

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Ericsson and Ciena collaborate on IP-over-WDM and SDN

Do company partnerships work? Ericsson and Ciena certainly think so, and provide a compelling argument for their collaboration in the areas of IP-over-WDM and software-defined networking (SDN). More such partnerships should also be expected.

Jan Häglund

Ericsson and Ciena have signed a global strategic agreement that provides Ericsson with Ciena's optical networking technology, while Ciena benefits from Ericsson's broader service provider relationships.

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Books in 2013 - Part 2

Alcatel-Lucent's President of Bell Labs and CTO, Marcus Weldon, on the history and future of Bell Labs, and titles for Christmas; Steve Alexander, CTO of Ciena, on underdogs, connectedness, and deep-sea diving; and Dave Welch, President of Infinera on how people think, and an extraordinary WWII tale: the second part of Books 2013.  

Steve Alexander, CTO of Ciena

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell. 

I’ve enjoyed some of Gladwell’s earlier works such as The Tipping Point and Outliers: The Story of Success. You often have to read his material with a bit of a skeptic's eye since he usually deals with people and events that are at least a standard deviation or two away from whatever is usually termed “normal.”

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