Amit Malik, vice-president and sales leader, Ciena India
At a time when 5G network coverage seems to be expanding rapidly in India, stakeholders across the telecom domain are excited to tap the emerging opportunities. In an interview with tele.net, Amit Malik, vice-president and sales leader, Ciena India, shares his views on India’s ever-expanding 5G landscape, Ciena’s initiatives to tap emerging opportunities, and the company’s future plans and strategies…
How has the onset of 5G services impacted the telecom landscape in India? What have been the three key dominating trends in this regard?
With 1.2 billion subscribers, India is currently the second-largest telecom market in the world, with several trends rapidly emerging in this age of digital transformation. 5G is revolutionising the way data is processed and transmitted, providing extremely low latency connectivity, and resulting in the rapid expansion of internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and cloud computing.
As a result, web traffic flows are changing and moving towards the metro and network edge, increasing the need for common routing and for switching aggregation platforms.
Because telcos in India are actively exploring 5G use cases, there have been several exciting proofs of concept, including breakthroughs in fields such as healthcare (for example, remote surgery), agriculture (for example, artificial rain induced by networked machines interacting with one another) and smart cities.
But translating customer needs into network innovations, and, in turn, into revenue-generating services will be instrumental to the success of 5G. A network strategy that considers the convergence of legacy and future network architectures, network automation and security, leveraging data-based analytics, will be key in meeting this demand.
How is Ciena leveraging opportunities presented by the 5G ecosystem? What have been the key initiatives in the Indian market?
The 5G network densification and roll-out happening in India will drive growth for Ciena, and we are very positive about the opportunities in the fastest growing internet market in the world.
We see growing interest in our lean, automation-centric routing and switching products because of the rise in 5G use cases and applications that enable video streaming, mobile gaming and augmented reality. And this has contributed to our decision to introduce local manufacturing, bringing our routing and switching products and supply chains closer to the customers in India, potentially accelerating delivery schedules.
What are your thoughts on the metaverse? How do you see it evolving in the Indian market?
One of our recent studies ranked India as the most enthusiastic about new immersive applications such as the metaverse. The study surveyed 15,000 business professionals across 15 countries, and found that 89 per cent of Indian respondents, higher than the global average of 71 per cent, could imagine their company introducing virtual reality (VR) technology in their work processes. But while Indian business professionals look forward to the coming of new applications such as the metaverse and are ready to collaborate in virtual settings, a significant section also believes that their workplaces have not moved towards VR-based collaboration because their organisations do not have reliable networks that can support VR conferences, with 40 per cent saying that the technology was not readily available.
How are telco networks evolving to become edge-ready? What are some of Ciena’s initiatives in the edge computing domain?
As telcos expand their 5G coverage and new use cases are introduced to the market, network performance and service agility in metro and edge networks must evolve. Telcos are thus considering a dynamic distributed cloud model, giving rise to the edge cloud.
Together with 5G, edge cloud will allow telcos to provide a more immersive experience to their subscribers by placing cloud assets closer to the network edge, where content is both created and consumed. Edge cloud will be all the more critical as telcos address massive machine-type communications and ultra-reliable low latency communications use cases that demand extreme reliability, high data rates, ultra-low latency and massive device scalability. Industry 4.0, connected vehicles, online gaming, augmented reality and VR are some such use cases.
To ensure that new cloud-native applications run seamlessly and deliver a compelling quality of experience, the edge cloud must be able to quickly adapt and dynamically adjust storage, compute and network resources to better meet the ever-evolving demands of the application layer. To become edge-ready, telcos must embrace this adaptability and flexibility, deploying a highly programmable and automated network that is increasingly open, modular and scalable.
The edge cloud ecosystem requires telcos to collaborate with several partners, including cloud service providers, system integrators, edge application providers and others. Stakeholders will need to work in tandem to ensure that the edge network performs with the required agility, security, scale and sustainability.
Ciena has been actively working with this ecosystem to help build the next generation of metro and edge networks and applications. We simplify 5G evolution and edge cloud deployments, helping telcos own the edge. Ciena’s xHaul routers allow operators to cost-effectively deploy 5G new radios in multi-architecture scenarios, future-proofing their investments as they evolve through different levels of centralisation, virtualisation and openness – fully leveraging the telco cloud and enabling new edge applications.
With support for soft and hard network slicing, alongside analytics-driven automation and professional services, Ciena’s 5G solutions position telcos to offer tiered service level agreements-based services to their customers, humans and machines, to better monetise their networks by unlocking new revenue streams in a sustainable manner. Additionally, telcos are able to address operational complexity and provide efficient management of the edge cloud network with intelligent closed-loop automation.
“One of our recent studies ranked India as the most enthusiastic about new immersive applications such as the metaverse.”
What are your views on the government’s Make in India and Atmanirbhar Bharat schemes? How is the company contributing to them?
Ciena supports the Government of India’s Digital Bharat and Make in India vision. Over the past year we have established localised manufacturing for our routing and switching portfolio in India, and are already expanding our capabilities. We are getting ready to deliver the first of these India-made products to customers. The fact that these are designed, engineered and manufactured in India is a matter of pride for us.
Additionally, our local R&D team in India contributed to many areas of Ciena’s WaveRouter product development – specifically in designing the software both on the data path and the control path, from device drivers, routing protocols to the management plane. The team in India also contributed to enhancing Ciena’s Manage, Control and Plan platform, a multi-layer domain controller.
What challenges does India need to overcome to establish a robust and resilient 5G ecosystem for all stakeholders?
With fierce competition, surging bandwidth demand, adoption of new technologies, ongoing support for 4G and earlier generations of legacy infrastructure, constrained spectrum availability, right-of-way clearance delays, and operational challenges all stand in the way of telcos creating a profitable 5G business case.
Additionally, questions such as network architecture modelling, how to manage the core network, whether software vendors or telcos will adapt to changing technologies, and migration and coexistence between automated systems and legacy infrastructure, must be diligently and flexibly addressed. More so because, as 5G standards, tools and architecture continue to evolve, the current choice of solutions deployed by telcos must be future-ready to maximise investments made today and in the future.
“I would expect India to be an outsized growth driver for Ciena in the foreseeable future.”
What are your future plans/strategies for the Indian market over the next few years?
Ciena’s revenue in the Asia-Pacific region during the first quarter of financial year 2023 showed a 41 per cent year-on-year and 23 per cent quarter-on-quarter increase, driven by our formidable strength in India. India remains a significant market for Ciena, and I would expect India to be an outsized growth driver for the company in the foreseeable future.
This is based on the fundamental drivers of network investment in India, including mobility, 5G and the cloud; the build-up of data centres; the growth of IoT and connected objects; increase in virtual and hybrid lifestyles; and the rise of AI, digital transformation and automation.
Bandwidth demand is also not slowing down. India is experiencing an influx of investment in its data centres due to its significant market potential, and relaxed policies and regulatory environment. The market is expected to show a 38 per cent compound annual growth rate between 2021 and 2028, according to a study by TeleGeography. This rate of growth implies that the international bandwidth demand will increase 10 times over this period.
We are confident that our leading technology and our strategy to expand our addressable market in key areas are closely aligned with these drivers and the areas of investment for our customers in India.
