Ciena is a leader in the telecommunications space, offering agile and innovative solutions that are set to change the way networks are built and managed. With more than US$3.5 billion in revenue, operating across 35 countries and over 7,000 employees, the company is continuing to go from strength to strength.
Sharing his insight into Ciena’s journey so far, Jürgen Hatheier, EMEA CTO, discusses what is driving the company’s growth, its transformation over the years and why customer experience is the key to success.
Tell us a bit more about Ciena and how the company started?
Ciena was first founded in 1992 and, as you can imagine, the networking and telecommunications sector has significantly changed since that time. During my tenure thus far, I’ve witnessed that the company always strives to stay at the forefront of innovation, leading with new technology and ideas that are set to improve communication networks. Over the past several years, Ciena has recorded strong growth and cemented its leading position in our industry.
If we take a look at the company’s first solution to come to market, it was designed to change and innovate, supporting greater volumes of traffic and data across the network. After only a few years of being in the market, Ciena was on an impressive growth track and when the company went public in 1997, it achieved the largest first day market capitalisation of any venture-funded start-up to that date – an impressive milestone.
And, if we fast forward to today, the network is absolutely critical to the way we live, work and socialise. So, Ciena has a perfect opportunity to continue its success in the market. Demands on our communication networks continue and now more than ever, network providers are looking for cutting edge technologies to help create networks that can dynamically adapt to changing and often unexpected demands.
What have you worked on this past year?
I joined Ciena during the start of the pandemic and understandably the last 12 months for many organisations have been difficult. Even the most global and well-established businesses (with remote working strategies already in place) faced some challenges. But I am extremely proud that during this time at Ciena we have continued to meet our customers’ expectations by introducing new products and services to help them meet their business needs. We’ve also been able to maintain customer support and continued to bring in new talent.
As an organisation, we need to continue to adapt to our customers’ mode of operations, market dynamics and technology trends. We’ve implemented an agile way of operating within our EMEA team with the goal to closely align with our customers’ modus operandi and to drive a better customer experience and ultimately greater results.
I’ve also been focusing on strengthening our leadership in EMEA. Not only in terms of cementing our commitment to deliver the latest networking solutions, but also in areas like 5G, Edge Cloud, network virtualisation and optical IP convergence. I’ve also been working with the team to drive more collaborative conversations with customers. To ensure we go beyond just selling products, we take a targeted approach that allows us to work together to create new strategies that will support the key initiatives to help our customers to remain highly competitive. Digitisation, automation and adaptable networks are front and centre in these conversations. We are working diligently with our customers to deliver a ‘cloud-like subscriber experience’, even when we are talking about the core connectivity which a service provider supplies to the end-users (B2B and B2C).
What is the company’s approach to management and people?
Effective management starts from the top down and Ciena has a strong leadership team. In fact, one of the things that attracted me to the company last year was the people. I have an amazing team around me, seasoned professionals and newcomers, who are all passionate and determined – it might sound like a cliché but one of the best things about my job is the people.
Ciena attracts some of the best talent in the industry and the company offers a number of initiatives all designed to support and empower employees with each voice heard. There are also several employee programmes that foster learning, development and mentoring. We also have a company-wide goal to ‘go do good,’ and an employee matching programme for donations and volunteer hours to support the communities where our employees and customers live and work.
The focus on people and management is one of the core values and mission statements of Ciena.
Can you tell us a bit more about Ciena’s vision and goal?
Ciena is a key enabler of the underlying technology that powers the world’s communication networks. As mentioned previously, demand for connectivity surges, thanks to the need for more cloud-based communications, streaming video, 5G, the Internet of things and more. Ciena focuses on doing everything it can to ensure that our customers – network providers and operators – can deliver that connectivity to users in the most efficient and seamless way possible. We’re also helping to shape future networks to be able to adapt to changing and unexpected demands.
Furthermore, we are also focused on driving digital inclusion and expanding technology access and connectivity opportunities for underserved students in our communities. We do this by mobilising our global workforce, leveraging our innovative leadership and working with customers, suppliers and other partners to enable greater digital connectivity. Ciena recently committed to fund US$10 million over a five-year period on programming that promotes digital inclusion through greater connectivity, access to technology and digital skilling, with a goal of expanding opportunities for 100,000 underserved students in our global communities. I’m looking forward to supporting the company in this effort.
What kind of clients and market do you serve?
Ciena’s technology is designed to help customers transition to service-driven networks to offer increased capacity, lower latency and support for today’s bandwidth hungry applications. With this in mind, our focus is on working with both enterprises and services providers. We have over 1,700 customers worldwide and along with supporting some of the world’s largest services providers such as AT&T, Telefonica, BT and Deutsche Telekom just to list a few, we also serve numerous enterprises in the healthcare, finance, transportation and retail industries.
What has your career path looked like?
I have worked in the telecoms and networking space for over 20 years now. Prior to joining Ciena, I worked at Pacific Broadband Networks, ARRIS Group and Technetix. In my younger days, I was working as an Engineer in a service provider while completing a master’s degree in business administration and economies in Austria.
What always excited me about the telecommunication industry is its global reach, its multi-faceted technology challenge and its importance and impact to society. Having spent four years in the US, I learnt about the different approaches to business and technology in this industry and later I applied those learning in my dealings in Asia and EMEA.
Business is personal to me and I genuinely care what our technology does to other people’s lives – it enables, amplifies and connects people in ways we may not have thought about 10+ years ago. Not knowing what is coming, that’s exactly what gets me up every morning – continued exploration, disruption and taking a leading role at Ciena to shape the future of the industry and the society with our advanced technology and solutions.
How do you equip staff with skills and knowledge?
An organisation that can support, enable and empower employees to have not only the skill sets of today, but those of the future, will thrive. By this, I mean that the key is not just about ensuring employees are trained on the current business needs and products, but also helping them to explore business and customer requirements that might be just around the corner. I strongly believe in constant learning as it is the key for sustained success, growth and competitiveness.
There are various ways organisations can bring this to life – taking Ciena as an example, we achieve that through hands-on sessions, demos, external and internal trainings, as well as through access to mentoring and online resources. We also make sure that the entire company – from sales to accounting to technical support – is educated on the trends and issues impacting our business and industry. We host frequent ‘lunch and learn’ type meetings with our leaders and also bring in external experts to keep the team knowledgeable. It is important that we enable employees, by not only providing them with the right tools and fundamentals but also by equipping them with the bigger picture insight.
More importantly, we want our employees to feel empowered to take responsibility for their learning and development, knowing they have the company’s support to embrace new methods.
We’ve also had great success bringing on and training new hires via specialised employee development programmes. A prime example is CienaNEXT, a programme that helps early-in-career candidates build acumen through a rigorous two-year learning and development programme. Essentially, the new hires rotate through different groups inside the company, so they get more hands-on experience across a variety of disciplines.
How do you work with other executives to make sure your voice is heard?
At Ciena, we have a very open and collaborative environment. Every voice is heard. Employees are encouraged to speak up and ask questions. I believe that the successful companies of the future are the ones that respect creativity and different ways of thinking.
It is also important to listen to your customers and understand their needs and concerns, this way you will understand the market and be able to add influence into any decision making. I also make sure my voice is heard by standing up for what I truly believe in. I am passionate, have strong opinions and I don’t give up easily – persistence is key, but it is also important to have a clear view on the market and your customers so you can make educated decisions that will add business value.
How do you ensure different teams in your organisation work together?
Working together is not all about tools – they are the foundation and at Ciena we embrace technology and we have got an amazing team of IT leaders that provide us with absolutely everything to allow us to collaborate, design and run the creative process together.
But in my opinion, the foundation for excellent cross-team collaboration is empowerment. We need to allow teams to make their own decisions, tap into all resources required to drive success and reward them for jobs well done while also allowing for room to learn and improve. Providing ‘psychological safety’ is a key element, I am asking all of my leaders to offer this to their team members. This is the foundation for collaborative high-performing teams.
Collaboration is critical in every industry. And, now more than ever – when more staff are working remotely – it is imperative that companies invest in the right collaboration tools like video conferencing and the cloud. At Ciena, we have also started to leverage Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Reality (AR) technologies to improve the way we work virtually. As an example, we have started using VR and AR in our labs for customer demonstrations and for our own IT tech support.
In summary, successful collaboration will be more than just having the right tech tools. It will also require leaders to be prepared for unexpected challenges and lead through it.