Ciena Delivers Self-Service Programmability and Reduces Vendor Lock-in with New Blue Planet Architecture

Ciena^® (NYSE: CIEN) unveiled key enhancements to its Blue Planet network orchestration software designed to help operators expand and accelerate the delivery of new services across both virtual and physical domains. Available today, the enhancements enable service providers to accelerate their transformation from closed and siloed network architectures to more open, on-demand software-driven networks.

Key Facts:

• Ciena’s Blue Planet division is leading the industry into a new era of truly open, software-defined, multi-vendor networks. Blue Planet software helps service providers automate services – from creation to orchestration to delivery – across both physical and virtual domains. This reduces operational costs, eliminates network complexity and drives greater competitive advantage through a level of service programmability previously unachievable.

• Blue Planet software advances Ciena’s OP^n® network architecture approach and delivers a number of critical benefits to service providers, which include:
  • Rapid Customization and Agile Development: New container-based, micro-services architecture allows rapid customization and accelerated development of new applications, including those from third-parties and based on open-source. Blue Planet loosely couples software functions within these containers to create and enable SDN Management and Control, NFV Orchestration, and Multi-Domain Service Orchestration. The new architecture also enables disaggregation of the software stack, enabling providers to add their own services.
  • Self-Service Programmability: New TOSCA-based service templates equip providers with ‘DevOps’ style self-service programmability of resources (physical, virtual, or cross-domain) for creating, deploying, or enhancing services. This reduces professional services fees typically required by OSS or integration vendors.
  • Simplified Integration with Legacy Systems: Support for business process model and notation (BPMN) standard simplifies integration with legacy OSS/BSS systems and simplifies providers’ ability to create, integrate and operate new services. BPMN reduces network complexity and improves the ability to offer programmable, self-service tools to end-users.
  • Freedom to Choose: Blue Planet supports non-Ciena domains (e.g. access, metro, core, cloud) to deliver end-to-end service orchestration. This enables providers to select and deploy best-of-breed options at each domain without losing operational simplicity and abstraction. It also reduces vendor lock-in and ensures simple, low-cost operations across multi-vendor physical or virtual functions and domains.
  • Open and Standards-based: Blue Planet incorporates more than 15 standards or open source code bases (including Docker, LINUX, TOSCA, BPMN, Netconf/YANG, etc). Additionally, open APIs expose critical data to northbound platforms.

Executive Comments:

• “Ciena’s Blue Planet division is delivering innovation in the network virtualization and service orchestration space. Their movement toward micro-services architectures and containers is in tune with leading network operators, who expect that these compelling technologies will help them to transform, virtualize, and differentiate.”
  - Michael Howard, Senior Research Director, IHS-Infonetics

• “More than a year ago, Ciena’s Blue Planet division (formerly Cyan), embarked on a journey to break down the software silos that are prevalent in the vendor community. Now, we’re poised to bring together SDN, NFV and service orchestration into a unified, open platform that enables service providers to leverage these cutting-edge technologies for building virtualized on-demand networks and cloud-based service offerings.”
  - Mike Hatfield, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Blue Planet, Ciena

• “We are beginning to see what innovation is truly possible with Blue Planet. One thing is clear – Blue Planet is disruptive and serves as an agent for transforming the network as we have known it. We look forward to continuing to work with our customers and driving new virtualized on-demand services into the marketplace.”
  - Francois Locoh-Donou, Senior Vice President, Global Products Group, Ciena

Events:

• These enhancements were unveiled at the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress, taking place this week in Düsseldorf, Germany.
• October 22 at 11 a.m. ET, Ciena will host a webinar, “Blue Planet - The Transformation of Your Network Starts with Software.” The webinar will feature Steve Alexander, Sr. VP & Chief Technology Officer, Ciena and Kevin Sheehan, Vice President, Global Operations, Blue Planet, Ciena. Click here to register.

Supporting Resources:

• Overview: Blue Planet SDN and NFV Platform
• Blog: Ciena Blue Planet Unveils the Dawn of Service Orchestration

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. Investors are encouraged to review the Investors section of our website at www.ciena.com/investors, where we routinely post press releases, SEC filings, recent news, financial results, and other announcements. From time to time we exclusively post material information to this website along with other disclosure channels that we use.

Note to Ciena Investors
Forward-looking statements. This press release contains certain forward-looking statements based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements are based on information available to the Company as of the date hereof; and Ciena's actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied, due to risks and uncertainties associated with its business, which include the risk factors disclosed in its Report on Form 10-Q, which Ciena filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on September 9, 2015. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding Ciena's expectations, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future and can be identified by forward-looking words such as "anticipate," "believe," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "should," "will," and "would" or similar words. Ciena assumes no obligation to update the information included in this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.