Ciena’s CEO: We’re in the early stages of a multi-year, durable network investment era
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Here are other stories on Ciena:
- Ciena’s CEO expects a large portion of hyperscalers’ capital spend will be on network infrastructure
- Ciena’s CEO sees MOFN as a key service provider growth segment
- Ciena’s CEO said telcos had underinvested in their networks
- Ciena shutters broadband PON plans to focus on cloud and data center network opportunities
- Ciena’s fiscal Q2 dominated by cloud provider demands
Ciena is confident in its position in the optical network industry, serving AI data centers.
Gary Smith, Ciena's CEO, told investors during its fiscal third quarter 2026 earnings call that it will end the year with a large order backlog.
“We continue to see strong momentum in customer demand and order flow, with a Q3 book-to-bill ratio that was significantly greater than 1, which resulted in a substantial quarterly increase in our backlog,” he said. “And we also expect backlog to grow at an even greater rate in Q4.”
Having already approached the level of orders booked in the third quarter, the company expects to end fiscal 2026 with over $10 billion in backlog.
“Looking at these industry dynamics, I would remind everybody that we remain in the very early stages of a multiyear, highly durable network investment era,” Smith said. “This is springboarding and is caused by the large and growing investments in data center infrastructure. AI is building on previous eras of communications, including those driven first by the Internet and then by the cloud, but it is doing so at a massive scale.”
He added that “as a result, AI is currently driving and will continue to drive significant increases in both bandwidth connectivity demand and network traffic growth.”
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About the Author
Sean BuckleySean Buckley
Sean is the Editor-in-Chief of Lightwave. He establishes and executes Lightwave's editorial strategy across its website, email newsletters, events, and other information products. Before coming to Lightwave in July 2023, he served as editor of Broadband Communities. Earlier, he served as senior editor of FierceTelecom and the editor of the former Telecommunications Magazine. He got his start in the optical industry in 1998 when he became the editor of enterprise and optical networks at Information Gatekeepers. He has a BA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and lives in Dracut, Mass, with his wife, two sons, and his cat, Dove.
