Nikhil Batra, Associate Research Director of IDC Asia/Pacific's Telecommunication Practice, caught up with Anup Changaroth, Ciena's CTO for Asia Pacific & Japan, to discuss how data proliferation, driven by ultra-high-definition video streaming, enterprise and consumer cloud adoption, and near-future applications such as AR/VR have been impacting Communications Service Providers’ (CSPs) network needs. They also discuss the criticality of network transformation, within the CSP core, to realizing successful 5G implementation and operation.