Technology trends such as cloud computing, exploding OTT media content, wireless backhaul, and high-bandwidth use cases such as AI and IoT are driving bandwidth demands across all business sectors. As a result, the market for 10G and 100G optical connectivity services is growing by >20 percent CAGR,  while demand for 1G services continues to decline steadily.

The shift from 1G to 10G and 100G presents major opportunities for operators who are able to upgrade their networks with scale in capacity and enter the high-speed connectivity market quickly. However, success in this market requires more than rapid technology evolution. It also requires a fundamental reorganisation of the business that extends to operational, marketing, and sales teams, training departments, and others—a fact that is frequently overlooked by carriers rushing to get their new services to market.

The real problem for operators is that many technology partners provide little or no post-sales support, especially in the critical area of organisational change management. As a result, operators are left with multiple complex projects to deliver before high-speed optical services can be launched, negatively impacting time to market and slowing down revenue cycles.

In such cases, lack of internal skills and resources to support new service introduction can also be an issue for operators. These factors can limit the effectiveness of the go-to-market strategy—including marketing and sales enablement activities—which ultimately impacts the operators’ ability to convert a new service into a healthy sales funnel.

By choosing to handle the organisational aspects of a new service launch in-house, operators significantly increase risks and costs to their business. Additionally, complex projects to prepare for new service launches can extend time to market and erode valuable first-mover advantage, seeing operators lose out to more agile competitors.

Accelerating technology and organisational change with ‘connectivity enablement’ programs

To address the challenges of delivering new, high-speed optical connectivity services, many forward-looking operators are now engaging with network services partners who can enable high-speed value propositions and help to bring them to market faster.

The idea behind network connectivity enablement is to support customers’ digital transformation journeys. This is achieved with a range of resources and programs that help operators transform both their technology infrastructure and organisation concurrently, thereby enabling the delivery of new high-speed services for data-intensive customer applications. This approach ensures that operators can bring their new services to market far more quickly and cost-effectively while accelerating network monetisation and returns on investments.

Key benefits of working with a trusted partner to enable new high-speed connectivity services include:

  • A larger share of the rapidly growing 10G and 100G optical services market
    By preparing the network and the organisation to deliver high-speed services faster, connectivity enablement helps operators gain valuable first-mover advantage and maximise their competitive advantage, revenues, and returns on investment.
  • Faster ROI for infrastructure and service investments
    Effective technology and organisational enablement allow operators to upskill their operations, and sales and marketing teams to make the biggest possible impact with new service launches. By empowering pre-sales and sales teams to engage with customers in a knowledgeable and compelling way, connectivity enablement becomes a key asset in the quest to build a healthy sales funnel.
  • Major ‘cost-per-bit’ transport savings
    Connectivity services enable operators to migrate to highly scalable, programmable infrastructure that greatly reduces transport costs compared to traditional network architectures. For example, for one streaming video use case, bypassing critical IP transit routes between critical content locations with 10G and 100G services resulted in a 30 to 40 percent reduction in PMO network costs.
  • Stronger, more profitable customer relationships
    Connectivity enablement allows operators to integrate high-speed optical services into their portfolios faster, helping them support customers’ digital transformation journeys as they move toward data centre and cloud-based operating models. With high-speed services, it becomes possible to deliver great user experiences for a range of highly sought-after applications and use cases, including business continuity/disaster recovery, artificial intelligence, content mobility, IoT, cognitive applications and others—all of which can help operators strengthen customer relationships, excel in customer experience, and minimise churn.

Ciena’s connectivity enablement capabilities

To help operators bring new high-speed connectivity services to market faster, Ciena provides enablement as an integral part of the service creation and implementation process, from new product introduction through cash fulfilment. This approach helps operators speed up every stage of their business cycle, from business case, planning, and solution design, right through to delivery and assurance. Critically, Ciena’s enablement programs go beyond infrastructure to ensure operators can bring new high-speed services to market successfully and convert infrastructure investments into a healthy and profitable sales funnel.

Ciena’s connectivity enablement programs have helped one major Tier 1 carrier upgrade its infrastructure and deliver far more cost-effective 10G and 100G optical services for its customers. As well as designing and deploying the Adaptive Network™ to support these services, the Ciena team has worked extensively with the operator to empower pre-sales, sales, and marketing teams, engineers, and others—helping to maximise returns on investment faster. Read the full case study here.

Key benefits of Ciena’s connectivity service enablement programs include:

  • Future-ready networking
    With Ciena’s technology innovation, operators can evolve their network infrastructures to provide virtually unlimited bandwidth on demand to support the next generation of connectivity services up to 100G and beyond.
  • Organisational readiness for fast returns on infrastructure investments
    Ciena’s consultative approach—including service introduction, delivery, assurance organisation enablement, and go-to-market—brings essential knowledge and support. This enables organisations to transform their infrastructure and ensure operational readiness for connectivity services concurrently, speeding up time to market and revenues.
  • Ciena Partner Network (CPN) program
    Ciena’s consultative approach supports a mutually beneficial partnering relationship. CPN provides tools and resources for rapid enablement. A key element of this is availability of sales and design academies, along with market insights to maximise enablement ROI, touching multiple teams from operations to pre-sales, sales, and marketing to ensure monetisation of network services to the fullest possible extent.
  • Tiered connectivity enablement to meet a range of business needs
    A range of options—from fully managed infrastructure projects and enablement programs to online guides, resources, and training courses—can help smaller operators bring high speed services to market faster and accelerate their ROI.

Get in touch

For more information about Ciena’s connectivity enablement programs, and how they help operators to prepare their infrastructures and internal teams for new service launches and convert more leads into sales, please contact Jillian Fickbohm, jfickboh@ciena.com, or visit: https://partners.ciena.com/English/