Ciena's CMO Rebecca Smith told Silverlinings that the bandwidth implications of cloud and 5G are "massive" and that operators will need a full arsenal of solutions — including coherent optics, artificial intelligence (AI) and liquid cooling — to help operators keep up with the demands from their enterprise and consumer customers.
Silverlinings sat down with Smith at the vendor's Vectors 2023 event in Ottawa, Canada, in early June, after a full day of touring the company's R&D facilities.
Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
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Liz Coyne: Hello. This is Liz Coyne here at Silverlinings. I'm live from Ottawa with Rebecca Smith of Ciena, chief marketing officer. I'm here for the Vectors 2023 event getting a really cool tour of all the latest and greatest in 5G technology and 5G monetization. What else do we see? Coherent optics, IP routing and even liquid cooling, which was really interesting. So Rebecca, thanks for joining me today.
Rebecca Smith: You so much for having me. And thanks for coming up to Ottawa and joining us here at Vectors. It's great to have you.
Coyne: Absolutely it's a pleasure. So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do here at Ciena, besides being chief marketing officer.
Smith: Yeah, so I just recently moved into the role of CMO. Before that I was the VP of portfolio and programs marketing, so overseeing the marketing of our portfolio, which was very cool — great way to get to know our technology and our customers. I'm really fortunate to have moved into this role having done that as my previous role.
Before that, I spent a number of years in software at Amdocs, which is more on the BSS/OSS side of the of the house, if you would if you think about a service provider, not so much on the network. And before that I spent some time doing consumer goods marketing at Kraft Foods, of all things. A little bit of a left turn there. But actually, it's kind of ironic before that as a student, I did one of my co-ops or internships at Nortel's head office.
Okay, so this is - it was interesting. When I came back to Ciena I felt like I came full circle, because CNI you know, acquired some of the key assets from Nortel, right? Yeah, so I feel like yeah, you kind of come home at the end of the day.
Coyne: You can see the circle and where you're meant to where you're meant to end up. We saw some of the innovations from Nortel today from acquisition, but yeah, eight and a half years ago from the optical business, which is a huge focus of Ciena right now with your coherent optics. Can you talk a little bit about what's going on here today with coherent optics?
Smith: As an industry leader, and we do enjoy industry-leading market share, and when it comes to optical, we've made significant investments around our coherent optics and this is what you're referring to from the original Nortel assets and we really evolved that portfolio you know.
We were the first to market with 40 gig, 100 gig, 400 gig, and with our latest announcement of WaveLogic6 on coherent optics. We will do 1.6 terabits per wavelength which is another amazing industry first for us. We just continue to kind of set a new standard, and it's really thanks to all of our amazing engineers and scientists who are based here in our Ottawa facility who've dedicated their life's work really to evolving that portfolio and really pushing the boundaries. Not just the boundaries of what they can do, but allowing our customers to push the boundaries of their own networks. When you have that kind of capacity, things open up possibilities open up pretty from a from a service providers perspective.
Coyne: Absolutely. So we saw the the 1600 [1.6] terabit chipset and the you know, manufacturing in the clean room going on. It's really exciting. I don't think obviously, it's not going to end with 1600. But what do you see are the applications that are leading us in to be able to use the 1600? Where are things going?
Smith: Yeah, so I think you know, there's a few things that have been happening right. So you see, 5G, right? 5G brought on a whole new set of applications and services. It has massive bandwidth implications.
You couple that with even things that the pandemic — think about how residential broadband is very different than it was before the pandemic and the amount of usage — so if you look at every part of the network from access, where you 5G residential broadband enterprise broadband usage, to aggregation to metro to the core, all of it is having unbelievable demand just because consumers are using more data. Now you put on top of that. So you have the 5G trend, and 5G is now really in deployment. It's not just, "Hey, isn't going to be great when 5G comes?" It's here.
But on top of that is cloud, right? You think about how so much data has to move to and from the cloud, between clouds. This also puts another whole other dimension of demand on top of the networks. So you see broadband accelerating, mobile accelerating, cloud exploding. And then of course, AI.
So it's really interesting, and I think we're very, we've been very lucky as a company because we've been guided by this whole concept of the adaptive network, which is an evolving end state, if you will, where we try our best and the way we think about our portfolio, and our roadmaps to create networks that can constantly adapt.
So whether it's 5G broadband going off the charts, or cloud, or AI, we always want to help our customers achieve networks that are dynamically scalable, so they can scale really big to 1.6 [Tbps] if they need it or beyond, or come down if it's not needed, and then to also have the insight and the telemetry coming off of those networks that they can apply intelligence to, right? What is it telling you? Where's there congestion? How is your network being used? And then inform with that intelligence and form a really robust control automated control function.
So you start to really have a layer of management on your network that you've never had before. And so because we've been guided by this vision of the adaptive network for some time, that's not new to us. As we see these trends emerging, whether it's 5G, AI or cloud, we're really well positioned. So being the first because we're talking about optical being the first to have a 1.6 terabit. Right, right. That's great. That's going to help our customers address that level of demand.
And we also know not everybody arrives at that level of demand day one. So we know that some of our customers will have different needs. And so we want to have a portfolio that can flex and grow with our customers. I personally think we're really well situated to intersect all of these major trends that we're starting to see on the horizon.
Coyne: Before we sat down, I [had a demo] with Kevin Wade and Balaji Subramanian from Blue Planet. They were talking about 5G monetization, which we were joking about. People have been talking about 5G monetization for so many years. It's, like, finally here. And what Kevin Wade said was that really 5G standalone has really enabled the 5G slicing to be real and something that operators can use to monetize their network investments. And I think that kind of leads into just what you're talking about is being able to flex and scale your network based on demand and what's happening but also ... from the demo, I saw, the portal lets you make those changes on the fly based on demand.
Smith: Exactly. Yeah. So and blue planet, you know, it's a key part of our portfolio. It's, it looks at the whole service lifecycle automation. So if you were a service provider and you want to figure out the best way to either roll in a new service or be able to do things like network slicing so that you can have new models to monetize your 5G network, it gives you that, that software gives you that flexibility, right? So it's a great complement to our hardware that that we offer around our 5G solutions as well.
Coyne: So I'm here this week, which is part of multiple weeks of this Vectors 2023 event. So tell me what is Vectors?
Smith: So Vectors is a really, it's a very special event for us. But it's a very special event in our industry. So we've been doing Vectors for a number of years. The pandemic, of course, put it on hiatus for a couple of years, so we're back at it and we're really happy. We invite customers from all over the world to come to our Ottawa lab facility and they get two days with us. They have a tailored agenda where they see demos and innovations that they need to see for their business.
And the whole idea is that, yes, we show our customers the technology we have available today, but we share with them our vision of where things are evolving to how we think our roadmap is going to change. And it gives them an opportunity to share with us their requirements. So it's just wonderful partnership, right, where we're showing them, they're telling us, we're listening.
So it's a wonderful event for us because we get so much out of it from our customers. Our customers really appreciate the opportunity to provide input and feedback. And it is incredibly energizing. And I don't know if that's just because we're back in person after that, after the pandemic, but to be able to have our engineers and our scientists be face-to-face with our customers and really share their passion for what they're doing is a very special thing. And I hope you saw some of that today in the demos you saw.
Coyne: I absolutely did. And even when we were walking around for the tour, you could look in the rooms and yes, see everybody talking with each other was really great. So what are your customers talking about? Right now? What's important for them?
Smith: Okay, so there's a lot of things. When we talked about 5G, a lot of our customers are asking that question — how do I monetize my 5G network? But there's some and obviously, artificial intelligence is sort of dominating a lot, right? Like how do how do I use artificial intelligent to run my network smarter? What kind of applications will artificial intelligence or services I'm going to have to support for my enterprise or my residential customers that they're going to want to have? So that's obviously topical and very top of mind.
The other thing that, and we're talking a lot about it at Vectors this year, is sustainability. So sustainability, no surprise, is very top of mind for our customers. It's something that they're asking for in terms of requirements for new projects. How are we operating as a sustainable partner for them? So we're really excited that we're able through a lot of our technologies, whether it's routing and switching or optical or what you saw with Blue Planet or MCP or manage control and planning software that we are integrating into those demos. How we're also helping them meet their sustainability targets, right? So if it's showing them, here's a system and it's helping you reduce space and power, that's what they really are very curious about — how we're operating and how we're thinking about sustainability from an innovation perspective. So that's another very key thing that we're talking about and showing them.
We often talk about sustainability in the context of our optical, right? So with our WaveLogic technology, reducing cost per bit, you know, from WaveLogic 5 to WaveLogic 6, it's a 50% reduction in power and in power cost. But also a routing and switching portfolio, we've really put a focus on sustainability.
So you saw the WaveRouter today, which is one of our newest coherent aggregation routers as part of our overall coherent routing approach. And one of the things that we're showing proof of concept on — and it's just a proof of concept — is the whole approach to liquid cooling, which is very cool. And it's not just for WaveRouter. We're also looking at how would that work with WaveServer, which is our most popular platform for if you think about Metro DCI. ... It's very popular with with data center operators. So they're looking at ways to, when you have these massive networks or huge data centers, how do you operate them more efficiently and more environmentally friendly?
So liquid cooling is just like I said, it's a prototype, but it shows the kind of innovation we do here where we kind of lean forward and think about, okay, what will that look like? And how do we help our customers to get there and what would their requirements be around it?
Coyne: I think that's one of the benefits of having our customers here is you can work collaboratively to understand their needs, and then try and build toward what they need.
Smith: Exactly. So that it's a win-win, right. It's a win-win for everyone. So yeah, I would say sustainability is also something that definitely top of mind for our customers while they're visiting us here at Vectors.
Coyne: Thanks so much, Rebecca.
Smith: Thank you, and thanks again for coming. It's been a pleasure having you here.
Coyne: I really appreciate the invite.