Ciena Crowns Winner of its First Open Networking Innovation Competition Held Jointly with KISTI and SingAREN

Ciena^® (NYSE:CIEN) today announced Team “SP Avengers” from Singapore Polytechnic the winner of its inaugural global application development competition, titled the Open Networking Innovation Competition (ONIC). This first-of-its-kind event, specially organized for research and education (R&E) institutions in the Asia Pacific region, was co-hosted with the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) and Singapore’s SingAREN.

Key Facts:

• The month-long competition sought to encourage R&E students, staff and faculty to develop applications that leverage Ciena’s industry-leading packet-optical networking platforms as well as the open software tools and interfaces that are reshaping the telecom industry.

• Participating teams, formed by students, staff and faculty members of R&E institutions affiliated with the co-hosts, leveraged the openness and programmability aspects of Ciena’s platforms to enable functions and capabilities not possible with traditional hardware-based infrastructure.

• Each team had one month to develop a software application for Ciena’s Waveserver™ stackable interconnect system on the Emulation Cloud™, an open application development portal, using publicly available application programming interfaces (APIs). Hosted in the cloud, Ciena’s Emulation Cloud helps accelerate DevOps and ease the integration with IT systems.

• After assessing all submissions based on level of innovation, potential for business use and near and long-term benefits, the judging panel, which consisted of senior Ciena executives, named Singapore Polytechnic’s Team “SP Avengers” champions of ONIC 2016. The winning team impressed the judges with its innovative mobile network management and monitoring system that was capable of easing the tedious process of troubleshooting with convenient remote access and user-friendly visualization. Led by team leader and Lecturer Phyoe Kyaw Kyaw, the team included Senior Lecturer Dr. Lim Joo Ghee and three students: Jeremy Lee Kian Kiat, Muhamad Farhan Bin Mohamed Haryadi and Seow Zhi Sheng.

Executive Comments:

• “The competition provided our team with the opportunity to work with software-based infrastructure and to learn how DevOps can be applied to even the realm of web-scale networking. With the limited time given, we managed to create what we hope is an innovative, yet useful solution. We enjoyed every moment; what’s more, we learned a huge amount about technologies that are driving the industry forward.
  - Phyoe Kyaw Kyaw, Lecturer and Leader of Team “SP Avengers”, Singapore Polytechnic

• “It’s always inspiring to see what smart young engineers can build with not much time – and perhaps too much caffeine. Team SP Avengers took great advantage of the new reality of openness in networks to build an app which was both useful and cool.  Congratulations to them.  All of us at Ciena look forward to seeing what these talented engineers do in the future.”
  - Rick Dodd, Ciena’s Chief of Open Architecture

• “We are proud to have been part of this event that gave rising engineers an opportunity to exchange ideas and see firsthand how today’s networks are evolving and transforming to be more agile and flexible.” - Buseung Cho, Director, Department of KREONET Operation and Service, KISTI

• “It was exciting to partner with Ciena on this initiative. We think it is vital to create opportunities that allow students and future developers to explore and develop software and optical networking expertise and apply their ideas to address real-world problems.”
  - Dr. John Kan, President, SingAREN

About Ciena
Ciena (NYSE: CIEN) is the network specialist. We collaborate with customers worldwide to unlock the strategic potential of their networks and fundamentally change the way they perform and compete. Ciena leverages its deep expertise in packet and optical networking and distributed software automation to deliver solutions in alignment with its OPⁿ architecture for next-generation networks. We enable a high-scale, programmable infrastructure that can be controlled and adapted by network-level applications, and provide open interfaces to coordinate computing, storage and network resources in a unified, virtualized environment. For updates on Ciena news, follow us on Twitter @Ciena or on LinkedIn.

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