Ciena is now spinning out its Blue Planet orchestration, a move first referenced in their earnings call and now reported by SDxCentral. Ciena offered a blog of its own on the topic recently. Both these sources are long on the “new division” piece, but short of details on the mission, the architectural model, and the sales strategy for Blue Planet.
When Ciena acquired Cyan and Blue Planet, it wasn’t exactly clear how the company expected to leverage their new asset. It hasn’t become any clearer since, and Ciena now thinks that having Blue Planet tied too closely to its core optical products is making sales more difficult. As I pointed out early on, different people buy service automation tools than buy optical products. However, it’s not certain that just breaking things out will make a real difference.
I had a lot of hope for the combination of Ciena and Cyan. Optical players are probably the only ones with a sure place in future networks; everything else could in theory be “virtualized” in some way. A new set of SDN layers above the optical layer, combined with strong orchestration capability, could absorb a lot of the features of Levels 2 and 3 in services. They could be much more capital- and operations-efficient too. Sneak up from the bottom and rule the world, in other words.
Ciena’s overall strategy of packet optics and blending electrical behavior seems to fit this model, and that may be the core of the problem. Companies are not surprisingly entrenched in what they’ve done all along, and so if you give them a story that includes that (remember, optical networks are the core of everything) and a bunch of new stuff that needs more sales effort, they hunker down on legacy. Blue Planet turned into more of a captive than a bridgehead to a new age.
Having Blue Planet joined at the hip with optical stuff surely didn’t make sense. Software products are totally different from network hardware, even if the products are “network software”. The optical sales types have no understanding of service orchestration, since optical products are transport-layer entities. As I’ve noted above, you don’t even sell them to the same people. However, orchestration or “service lifecycle automation” as I’ve termed it, still could integrate optical network behavior into service behavior more efficiently and thus benefit Ciena. A separate Blue Planet division is potentially a solution to the original problem but it brings or at least exposes four new risks.
First, you don’t create insight by dividing ignorance. Ciena didn’t have people who could knowledgeably plan for and sell Blue Planet. It wasn’t a matter of having them buried in the optical masses, they weren’t there. They still aren’t there, new division or not. Anyone at Cyan who really knew anything about lifecycle automation (and Cyan wasn’t in my view an enormously insightful service lifecycle automation outfit even as an independent company) didn’t make their way to the surface in positioning terms.
This challenge was exacerbated by the addition of Packet Design and DonRiver to the Blue Planet ecosystem. We start with an orchestration tool that Ciena didn’t really get. We add in specialized Level 3 features that Ciena, as a transport vendor, arguably gets even less. Combining these three product sets into a new division may integrate them organizationally, but not functionally.
Second, making Blue Planet a separate division doesn’t necessarily deal with the sales issues. Who will sell the stuff, a new sales force? I doubt it. Will the new division, still joined by invisible silken ties of sales to the optical line, end up doing nothing more than trying to lever Blue Planet into those same optical deals? I think that’s a real possibility.
The sales challenge really starts with a positioning challenge, which Ciena hasn’t addressed, period, even at the time of the initial Cyan deal and at any of the other two related acquisitions. What, exactly, is this combined collage of tools supposed to add up to? Is it full-bore service lifecycle automation? Is it “resource-layer automation” presuming a higher-level service automation tool? The role dictates the sales target, which in turn dictates the salesforce knowledge, experience, and support collateral.
Challenge number three is a cohesive technical architecture. Three legs are a necessary condition for a stool, but not a sufficient condition. You need a seat, and you need them assembled. Cyan’s Blue Planet mission was NFV, but Ciena has gradually de-emphasized that, given that NFV hasn’t set the world on fire. Perhaps Packet Design and DonRiver (the latter in particular) are supporting elements in a new grand strategy, but what is that strategy? It’s not NFV, but what?
I think Ciena intends, in a loose ad hoc sense, to offer a set of agile-resource-layer automation facilities. If that’s what they want, they need to define just what such a thing is, how it relates to broader service lifecycle automation, and how it relates to existing network equipment and perhaps to future software-hosted features. NFV provided a framework for such a thing—imperfect in my view—with the “virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) and the VNF Manager (VNFM). Does Ciena want to presume this structure, or does it propose to define a new one that can be fit to the NFV model, or even abandon that model totally? Whatever they propose, they have to define it and how it links with the tools and missions that service management demands and that Ciena is not electing to support itself.
The final problem is the cloud. Whatever the details of the implementation of the concept might be, it seems pretty clear that virtual networking is the foundation of the cloud. Not surprisingly, the cloud community is fleshing out what virtual networking means and how it’s implemented. That same community is defining how distributed components operate in concert to create an experience, which is exactly what functional components of services have to do. The work there is broad, compellingly good, and totally applicable to virtual service frameworks and components. Ciena has done nothing to relate to it.
Cloud-native is everyone’s goal, and in theory Ciena could fit Blue Planet into a cloud-native ecosystem. In practice, they’d have to address this point and the three previous ones at the same time to gain anything from that effort. They need a mission and an architecture to fulfill it. The mission has to make sense in the broad framework of transformation and operations efficiency. The architecture has to blend cloud-native with service lifecycle automation, NFV, and the optical-layer stuff. All of that has to be wrapped in a sellable story, marketed, and pushed in tandem through the sales force.
Can they do it? Perhaps the best answer we can offer for that is that we have an industry full of vendors with product lines that are much more aligned with the service-layer story than Ciena has, and none of them have been able to pull themselves out of the network-level mud. Ciena is at the bottom of that mud, technologically speaking, and so has many more layers of it to pull themselves through.
This is far from an impossible task, but you have to wonder whether Ciena, had they recognized the need and the pathway to positioning success, wouldn’t have taken the path back when they were doing the Packet Design and DonRiver deals, or at least before or along with their new-division announcement. I think it’s clear that Ciena would have to both realize the need for some critical positioning work for their new division, and have some sense of how to carry that out. They might have that now, of course, and the organization might be the start of a shift.
Or not. I still think there’s at least an even chance that Ciena is positioning the whole division to be sold off. Integrated with its other operations as a related product, that might be difficult to do because breaking out the assets would be complicated. Make a separate division out of Blue Planet, and you can sell it off in a wink. I think Wall Street would be unlikely to reward that move given that they’ve been acquiring companies to flesh out their Blue Planet offering, and would be unlikely to reap full value were they to sell it off. Still, stranger things have happened, and as I’ve said, no network equipment vendor has made a success of software yet. Ciena might be the first, or it might have already decided to throw in the towel.
There’s a third possibility, of course, which is that Ciena is trying to fix a non-organizational problem with an organizational change, and has no real intention of either selling off Blue Planet or making it into something useful. That to me seems not only the most muddled but less-likely-to-succeed scenario. Does drawing a new organizational chart change things like product architecture or sales success? Not that I can recall, and we can see from what’s happened with Blue Planet to date what would likely happen if Ciena stays the course. Listening, Ciena?