Ciena India is hiring full swing!

NEW DELHI: Employees are an organization's interface to the outside world; all of us directly, indirectly; consciously, unconsciously reflect the work culture and values of our workplace. Interacting with employees of

Ciena, Maryland USA based network specialist reflects the rich work culture and strong values of the company.

Ciena's chief technology officer and senior vice president of products, Steve Alexander was recently in India to inaugurate its research and development (R&D) facility at Gurgaon. Spread across a sprawling 95,000-sq ft. this facility is the only R&D center outside of North America, informed Steve.

The Gurgaon facility can house 300+ engineers and is complete with a gym, a coffee shop, travel

center and an unconventional conference room to maximize creativity and innovation. "R&D is like art and architecture; it requires lot of creativity and a strong design element, this conference room is to foster creativity and innovation amongst our engineers."

"India is one if the fastest growing telecom market in the world with a rapidly expanding talent pool. To continue to grow and to map our product development and our expansion that is growing globally one has to be where innovation is happening and not just watch from a distance, that's why we are here," says Steve.

The idea of India facility of Ciena was conceived last year and the entire project responsibility was handed over to

Neeraj Gulati and Dimple Amin

who took charge as vice president and managing director and vice president of engineering at Ciena India, respectively.

Neeraj gives full credit to his efficient team who have made this dream come true. "When you integrate into a team the magic happens and I guess it has happened."

Speaking on the role of the Ciena India, Steve said, "Ciena makes a large amount of bandwidth high capacity systems; next piece we have invested in is developing series of products on intelligent optical switching. We are taking that technology and expanding it to the Ethernet space. This facility would play an important role in the expansion of all these technologies to the Ethernet space. We have a number of initiatives started in terms of business continuity, disaster recovery, data center extension -- the ability to shift large amount of data center information between sites, cities and across countries; much of that work would be handled out of this facility. We have a very well defined product development life cycle (PLC) process laid down at Ciena; the uniqueness of this facility is that it will participate in the entire product development lifecycle from conceptualizing to the design to actually deploying it on the customer site."

The India center will work on pieces of the entire range of Ciena's product line; from business continuity, to disaster recovery to data center management, high-capacity transport products like Corestream; it would also work on a family of Ethernet centric transport and switching products, informed Steve.

"The target market for this center is spread all across the globe. We have the ability to do product initiation to development for multiple markets multiple geographic requirements and varied customer standards. We are well versed in requirements of the European, Asian as well as the North American markets."

Inaugural function, Ciena India		Steve Alexander addressing at the inaugural function		Inaugural function, Ciena India

Given the complexity of the product range and the high skillset required to handle them the company has a well-defined induction process lined-up for engineers who would be joining the India center. Elaborating on that, Steve said, "We have a highly skilled workforce; we intend to take them to our North American facility for training on Ciena's core competencies so that they get to know products, processes, platform etc and once they are back here they would do work that is unique for their site. They would take complete product ownership and would be free to do their own feature development and build products from scratch. They would engage with the customer closely to understand the product requirements; have a role in supporting lab evals for the customer; provide support; attend to new feature requests that a customer may have." Career opportunities at Ciena

"In next five years the Indian center would be the single largest R&D center; it would have by that time completed three PLCs; and build products around Ethernet, which is a global standard and push those technologies into the broadband access products and transport and switching products. It would also initiate products specifically for the broadband wireless access points. Ethernet access, resilient networking capability for Ethernet, smart transport etc " informed Steve.

"We are growing sales and marketing presence in India. We have Tata and Reliance on our customer list; we would like to continue our relationship with them. We may consider the appointing some channel partners also. We would like to expand our customer base in data center and disaster recovery space. Globally, we have two-thirds of the top thirty network operators in our kitty. Our focus is not only on selling to more people but also on selling more to people."

"Ciena has a long history of technology innovation; we have many 'firsts' to our credit. We have a leadership position in flexible positioning of networks. We have a great reputation of providing resilient and highly available networks; Ethernet is our most important focus. We have been able to attract and retain top talent. It's a place where individuals can make a tremendous difference. We have a very collaborative kind of relationship with our customers; we closely interact with them and try to solve even their most difficult problems. Close customer interaction, and attending to their problems has worked greatly for us," said Steve.

Speaking on career opportunities at Ciena, Steve elaborated that engineers who get associated with Ciena can look forward to work with a global brand and best of technologies. "Owing to our size, we share a very close relationship with our employees and make each individual feel like a very important part of our ecosystem. Its like a small well knit family where individuals do not get lost and are appreciated for good work. We have a strong culture of trusting and giving each individual an opportunity to grow," added Neeraj.

There are thirty engineers on board at Ciena India, and with the facility up and running in less than a month time the company plans to ramp up its recruitment plans and would be organizing multi-city recruitment roadshows. According to Neeraj, "the company plans to hire 300 plus engineers in couple of years. We are not really following a quota system; we are going full-blown at it. We would be hiring the right kind of talent instead of just filling up our numbers."