Ottawa is the telecom equipment supplier's largest R&D centre with roughly 1,300 people on staff, or 30 per cent of the company's workforce in Canada. Next month, some of Ciena's top customers are expected to visit the Maryland-based company's Carling Avenue facilities as part of its annual Vectors Summit.
The event gives clients a preview of technologies under development and a chance to communicate their technological needs to Ciena staff.
About 100 groups from around the world have been through the facility so far this year to see product demonstrations areas, such as cloud computing and Ethernet technology.
On Wednesday, the company opened its doors to the media to demo its terabit transmission technology, which will make network connections even faster than the 40G and 100G networks service providers are starting to upgrade to now.
Coherent solutions, which was developed by Ciena, makes it possible to increase the traffic on 100G optic fibres by up to ten times the current speed of a 10G fibre. This is welcome news to service providers, who have seen traffic growing on their networks by 100 per cent, while watching revenues stay the same. By upgrading to the faster network, service providers are able to reduce latency as the information is past through the network.
Dino DiPerna, vice-president of engineering, said that most of upgrade deployments of optical networks were being done in the United States, but the company is also seeing deployments to other parts of the world, such as India.
"There is such a thirst for connectivity," said Mr. DiPerna.
The development of this technology was possible because of a "war chest of patents", most of which Ciena acquired when the company purchased the Nortel Network's Ethernet networks division. The patents were one of the reasons for acquiring Nortel, Mr. DiPerna said.
Ciena acquired the division from Nortel in 2010 for $773.8 million, doubling the size of the company.
The optimization of video is another element to Ciena's business, as it works on technology to transmit video faster and cheaper. Specifically, the technology enables uncompressed video signals across networks, with applications in live sports broadcasting, HD surveillance, and distance learning.
Earlier this year, Ciena signed an agreement with Ontario's Liberal government for $25 million in funding in exchange for hiring 353 new staff, and to invest $900 million into R&D in Ontario. James Frodsham, Ciena's senior vice-president and chief strategic officer, said the company is "ahead of the curve" in its hiring commitment to the government, with 1,325 people employed by the company in Ottawa.
Ciena is slated to move from its current location at the Nortel campus on Carling Avenue in March 2015, when the Department of National Defence takes ownership of the building. Ciena is committed to being a "long-term investor in Ottawa," said Mr. Frodsham, adding that the company would remain in Ottawa once it vacated the Nortel campus building.
