Creating the World’s Most Innovative Networks Through Partnership

One Team, One Mission: How Partnership Enables Success

This article is about how a business partnership can change the world.

Allow me to start at the beginning. Ciena doesn’t just have clients – we have partners. If you’ve followed the Leader’s Edge series from Bruce Hembree, you get a sense for just how invested we are with our clients (check out the latest article here). I have the privilege of leading a team at Ciena that focuses on one of our long-standing global partners.

Through this partnership, we helped pioneer a leading wireline network, which supported the explosion of wireless that allowed us all to connect from anywhere. Wireless phones changed life as we know it, and now we’re at it again with 5G, working to build the infrastructure to support the next technological revolution.

It isn’t an ordinary partnership where each team functions in silos and casually works together on certain projects periodically. It’s much bigger than that – and it has been that way for more than a decade. We maintain the mindset of One Team, One Mission.

One Team, One Mission means we operate symbiotically – Ciena provides the technology and our partner provides the service – and together we provide optimal value to the end-user (all of us). To us, One Team, One Mission is much, much more than a catchphrase... It’s a way of life.

Our close collaboration enables us to deliver the solutions of tomorrow like one network to support all lines of business and fueled by both the Ciena technology and its dedicated people. Because we share a vision of the big picture, we can work together to make it happen. Together, we have anticipated the needs of our customers and focused our collective efforts on delivering almost limitless bandwidth capacity.

As partners, we have formed a powerful partnership, an atomic-bond, that exists to create ideal outcomes for customers. Networks take years to build and last decades, so they must be engineered to scale and evolve. At Ciena, behind the scenes of these projects is One Team-- people making it happen, people who support one another, people who celebrate each other’s birthdays and the holidays, people who attend each other’s weddings. As our team motto states, we are indeed One Team with One Mission: We are creating infrastructure robust enough to support whatever requirements tomorrow brings that will move us all forward.

Innovation rarely happens in a vacuum. Ciena believes that contributing to the collective good requires a total team effort and can only be done as One Team, One Mission.