view printer-friendly version

CIENA LAUNCHES WORLDWIDE BUSINESS PARTNER PROGRAM

CNT Becomes Solutions Alliance Member

Ciena® Corporation (Nasdaq: CIEN), a leader in global network solutions, today announced the launch of its Business Partner program, comprised of two key elements, the Ciena Solutions Alliance and LightWorks™ Technology Alliance. Ciena also announced that Minneapolis-based CNT® (Nasdaq: CMNT), the global expert in storage networking solutions, has become the newest Ciena Solutions Alliance partner.

Ciena’s Business Partner program provides structure to the company’s collaboration efforts with third parties to develop and deliver expanded intelligent networking solutions. It serves as a platform for Ciena to meet effectively the specific needs of the world’s largest carriers and enterprises with differentiated services and carrier-class reliability.

“Ciena solutions will help our partners bridge the gap between the current capabilities of carrier networks and the evolving communications needs of enterprises,” said Gary Smith, president and CEO of Ciena. “The Business Partner program expands the scope of Ciena’s addressable market in response to increasing demand for optical networking technologies among enterprises, and government, higher education, and research organizations. The existing network suppliers and integrators these organizations utilize can now look to Ciena for optical networking technologies.”

The Solutions Alliance program is designed for partners that represent Ciena’s products and services. It offers service providers, global integrators and value-added resellers (VARs) a comprehensive set of resources to deliver expanded network solutions to their enterprise customers based on economical optical network connectivity for both emerging and existing applications. Ciena also provides training and certification programs, sales and design tools, co-marketing opportunities, and access to a partner extranet to aide Solutions Alliance members. To date, Ciena has signed on more than 15 Solutions Alliance partners around the world.

The newest partner, CNT, provides storage solutions to extend storage area networks (SANs) for business critical networks and to optimize intersite storage utilization, focusing on disaster recovery, remote backup and storage infrastructures. Ciena offers optical networking solutions to extend SANs to geographically distributed locations. Combined, the two companies provide a baseline platform for enterprise network consolidation of voice and data services as well as network optimization.

“CNT is pleased to be a Ciena Solutions Alliance partner,” said Tom Hudson, president, chairman and CEO of CNT. “Our customers will benefit from the flexibility, scalability and manageability of Ciena’s optical networking products. This partnership also ensures quality optical solutions are available today for our customers’ diverse storage networking needs. We look forward to working with Ciena to expand our market opportunities in North America.”

The other key component of the Business Partner program, the LightWorks Technology Alliance, is designed for partners with technologies that complement Ciena’s solutions in meeting the needs of carriers and enterprises. It expands upon Ciena’s architectural vision for integrated, intelligent networks by driving design, development, testing and interoperability. These partnerships with networking, storage and OSS equipment vendors generate economical network solutions for customers in support of emerging applications and data services.

"Ciena's new partner program is helping to widen the company's playing field for offering networking technologies and services," said Sterling Perrin, senior research analyst, at IDC. "By expanding beyond its traditional base, with both new vendor partners and new channel partners, Ciena can increase its revenue potential and better position itself for growth moving forward."