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CIENA WINS AWARD FOR TOP-NOTCH CUSTOMER SERVICE TOOLS

CIO Magazine Honors CIENA's Web-based SmartTools™ as Top 50 Intranet Site

Ciena Corporation (NASDAQ: CIEN) today announced that CIO magazine has named Ciena's Web-based customer service system, SmartToolsTM, a 1999 CIO Web Business 50/50 winner for online business excellence. Web Business 50/50 awards are presented annually by CIO magazine to 50 Internet sites and 50 intranet and extranet sites that go beyond customary Web practices.

"Ciena's customer service mantra is 'people by name, products by serial number.' In a collaborative effort across several Ciena teams, we have developed a Web-based interactive customer service and tracking system that truly serves that philosophy," said Patrick Nettles, Ciena's president and chief executive officer. "We're pleased with CIO's recognition of this achievement, but even more rewarding is the knowledge that Ciena's SmartTools enable us to provide world-class customer service and support."

"An equipment provider's ability to support its customers' networks has a direct bearing on a carrier's operating costs and therefore is becoming an increasingly important criterion in the purchase decision process," said Gary Smith, Ciena's senior vice president, worldwide sales. "Ciena's SmartTools enable our technical support engineers to track operational trends and predict problems before they occur, facilitating scheduled network maintenance, reducing operational costs and increasing network availability. All of which means more efficient network performance for our customers."

Four SmartTools provide Ciena's technical support engineers with knowledge that eliminates much of the information gathering that occurs when customers call for technical support. The Web-based SmartTools provide a detailed, graphic roadmap of each customer's network with point-and-click details down to each module by serial number and software load. The system's interactive database of all installed equipment allows Ciena engineers to correlate issues across customers, track trends, and deliver predictive maintenance, in many cases before a real problem occurs.

In addition, SmartTools provides a detailed history of each piece of Ciena equipment, tracked by serial number from manufacture through installation and network life cycle. The system even tracks interactions between Ciena, its customers and their equipment - allowing employees to be automatically paged or e-mailed with customer service reports.

"Ciena is proud to recognize the teamwork and dedication that went into building an intranet system so easy to use that it requires no user documentation and no user training," Nettles said. "The resulting set of interactive customer-service tools makes it much easier for our support engineers to help solve customers' network problems before they happen and to provide regular operational, statistical and performance reports on customers networks - yet another way Ciena gives its customers an edge in the marketplace."

In February, a study of telecommunications carriers conducted by Yankelovich Partners named Ciena as the industry leader in delivering service and support to customers.