Openness is critical in the Adaptive Network to allow network providers choices in the products and technologies they can deploy to enable their network evolution. Providers that embrace openness will be able to select the technology solutions that best meet their needs in terms of operational fit, performance, power consumption, and telemetry, resulting in dramatically lower costs, increased agility, simpler scalability, and a network architecture that is highly flexible, to take advantage of future innovations that may not be apparent today.
Ciena’s vision of the Adaptive Network is underpinned by its OPn® philosophy to offer customers the greatest degree of choice in how they evolve and execute their network strategies. This philosophy was introduced over five years ago and has defined how the company approaches product development. As a result, through important design principles such as modularity and open APIs for programmability, Ciena can now address the broadest range of openness and consumption models in the market. For example, we have delivered open interfaces that make packet-optical WANs more programmable and interoperable, including open APIs and open line system capabilities.
Ciena offers open tools and environments, like its Emulation CloudTM and Blue Planet DevOps Toolkit, to enable its customers to add, design, and model services and simplify operations. And Ciena facilitates and participates in an open ecosystem across the industry—among both large and small vendors—to mix and match best-of-breed technology for any given customer architecture.
