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Ciena Unveils Go-To-Market Strategy and New Identity as Network Specialist

Ciena® Corporation (NASDAQ: CIEN), today announced its go-to-market strategy and new identity incorporating the Company’s dramatic business transformation and organizational alignments of the past two years. Ciena’s positioning as the “network specialist” grows out of its heritage and strength in solving specific issues in transport and optical networks and applies that specialization to today’s most critical applications to solve customers’ key business problems. The identity underlines Ciena’s relationships with customers and reflects a clear differentiation from competitors.

The Company’s repositioning signals a milestone in an evolution resulting from a series of deliberate, strategic acquisitions, the creation of an array of partnerships, and recent moves by the Company to realign its organization and operations. Ciena is building on its heritage as a specialist and its belief that its customers want a close link with a respected partner that has deep experience in supporting customer-driven applications. A strategic specialist must be able to adapt rapidly to a changing environment and embrace its customers’ ways of doing business, while bringing to the table innovation, technological expertise and regulatory leadership.

Gary Smith, CEO and president of Ciena, commented, “Ciena has undergone profound change over the last two years during a process where we reexamined the value we bring to customers. We believe that we now have the best of breed products and services to address customers’ most critical pain points, and we also have developed the sales and operations infrastructures to support this approach to the market. We believe we now have the breadth of application-specific solutions and supporting customer validation to credibly lay claim to our role as a network specialist; identifying our unique market position and guiding decisions as we go forward.”

Ciena’s position emphasizes that it will not be all things to all customers, while acknowledging that its efforts might touch many different parts of a network and will evolve as market and customer needs change.

“During their last two years of acquisitions and change, Ciena’s aim has not always been crystal clear to the market,” said Matt Davis, director of Broadband Access Technology and Service with industry analyst firm Yankee Group. “Articulating this application-driven strategy demonstrates that Ciena is becoming focused on the overall solution – and it may prove to be sustainable in this increasingly changing and diversified communications environment, where content providers try to fit into service networks and service providers seek the best revenue-generation solutions.”

The specialist identity places Ciena’s core value to the marketplace in its ability to provide customers flexibility and a breadth of offerings, along with the wherewithal and expertise that comes with being an established player in the industry. New channel and sales strategies, competencies gained from its acquisitions, and a broadened portfolio give Ciena the strength to be a valued supplier partner.

The application focus announced today includes five areas of concentration, which will continue to develop as end-user uptake and needs evolve. These include:

• Access infrastructure upgrades for service delivery;
• Storage and Ethernet service value amplification;
• Network scaling for high-bandwidth applications like video and multimedia on demand;
• Core network convergence and automation; and,
• Packet network integration and optimization for enhanced new services.

All four of Ciena’s customer segments – service providers, cable operators, government agencies, and large enterprises – are spanned by today’s application-focused launch, which is supported by Ciena’s demonstrated ability to solve real-world network problems, maximize the business value of enabling services, and boost network economics and improve cost efficiency. This focus builds on the Company’s core networking solutions, but specifically targets emerging applications to address new customer demands.

About the Repositioning

To best understand the needs of its customers and how it can better serve the marketplace, Ciena engaged corporate branding leader Hornall Anderson to survey customers, employees, analysts and other industry influencers. The process undertaken by Ciena concluded with testing the positioning among both existing and potential customers. As part of launching its new identity, Ciena also unveiled a new logo, which visually symbolizes a more consultative, adaptable image. The mark features a scripted ‘ie’ within the Ciena name that plays out Ciena’s tailored, “as in” application-centric approach to the customer relationship.

In addition, Ciena is supporting the launch with a new customer-facing website (www.ciena.com). Other support will include global trade press advertising targeting all customer segments, focused, integrated marketing campaigns and events, a new digital literature system and sales support collateral. These efforts and ongoing marketing activities throughout the Company will continue to reinforce Ciena’s market positioning as the network specialist.

“New services represent an enormous growth area today and in the future. But service providers and enterprises need to know that they can manage their total cost of ownership as they enable enhanced services in their networks,” said Smith. “We believe our applications-based approach targeting the critical and high-value network and business issues sets us ahead of the pack in terms of market vision and positioning and we are acting upon that vision in every aspect of our business.”