Telecom Lead India: Ciena is planning to strengthen its presence in Indian telecom market.
Its resources in research and development team will grow significantly from the current 500 people due to the potential of the Indian market and global opportunities. Globally, Ciena has around 4,463 resources. Though India is not the top three markets for Ciena, the networking specialist’s more than 10 percent of resources are currently located in India.
Ciena’s Indian strategies are focused around its innovative product lines, end-to-end offerings and go-to-market approach.
Rick Dodd, vice president, Global Marketing, Ciena, in an interview with TelecomLead.com, said: “We are working with several operators for deploying 100G networks. There is a strong demand for 100G networks. We will be tapping both 3G and 4G opportunities here.”
2012 has been a good year for Ciena India. Ciena India is doing well thanks to its innovative products and close association with Indian telecom operators. Ciena is working with Reliance Communications and Tata Communications for their submarine projects.
Ryan Perera, country head, Global Field Organization India, Ciena, said: “Our end-to-end offerings assist us in gaining market share in the country.”
Ciena supports several Indian telecom operators to gain funding from US banks for their network roll outs. “Vendor financing is an important aspect. Though we do not fund directly, we assist mobile companies to raise funds from American financial institutions. In the last two years, vendor financing has gone up,” Perera added.
Ciena is also assisting Indian telecom players to improve performance of their network in a number of ways. One way is to modify products for Indian customers.
“While Ciena does not develop India only customized products, because the Indian market represents some unique challenges for vendors, specifically the relatively harsh operating environment and potential for fiber cuts and network disruptions, Ciena has spent not an insignificant amount of R&D development effort to ensure that our technology, such as our OneConnect Control Plane solution, is able to automatically and rapidly react to such disruptions to ensure that all customer traffic is re-routed without service disruption to end-customers, thus maintaining very high service levels,” Perera added.
Ciena competes with Chinese equipment maker Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, etc. to gain market share in India and global markets.
According to Infonetics Research, Huawei is leading the optical network hardware market in second quarter of 2012. Alcatel-Lucent retained its #2 spot as its optical revenue grew 5 percent in second quarter. Ciena posted its strongest quarter on record, maintaining 3rd overall position.
Ciena is in 2nd position in the WDM segment. Asia Pacific notched a big increase in the second quarter, with large seasonal gains by Huawei and ZTE. Despite tepid growth in the first half of 2012, Infonetics expects significant growth in optical spending in China, where ZTE continues to take market share from Huawei.
