The UK arm of a US optical-networking company, with its main office in Shoreditch, London, that supplies the high-capacity fibre equipment and software used by telecoms operators.
Ciena makes the equipment and software that carry huge amounts of data across fibre-optic networks, and it describes itself as a partner to network operators. An older trade report called it a global provider of intelligent optical networking systems and software. Operators such as telecoms companies and cable providers use this kind of technology in their long-distance and city-wide networks. Ciena's own pages say it works alongside customers to redefine the future of their networks, with the goal of making them smarter, faster, more integrated and more scalable.
Ciena's UK business is registered as Ciena Limited, which Companies House shows was incorporated on 10 March 1997 and is active. A 2002 Light Reading article described a new, expanded London office as Ciena's European headquarters, with a customer demonstration lab. That article is very old, and the people it names have almost certainly changed, so we do not rely on it for anything about today. The company's own worldwide contact page is a better guide to where it works now.
Ciena lists several UK locations. Its main office is The Bard, 20 Curtain Road, Shoreditch, London EC2A 3NG, with a separate London Learning Lab in nearby Scrutton Street. It also lists offices in Belfast on Great Victoria Street, Edinburgh on Canning Street and Reading at Fountain House on Queens Walk. This spread across London, Reading and two of the UK nations makes it one of the more widely spread employers in this list, though we do not know how many people work in each place.
On culture, we found no UK-specific company pages, so we make no claims. Ciena's public pages show account teams organised around large customers. Its Liberty Global account team page, for example, lists senior directors, account directors, engineers, project staff and commercial staff, which shows how it organises people around a customer. UK job listings from third-party boards mention roles such as solutions engineers, sales engineers and pre-sales system engineers for UK markets, in London and Bristol.
The roles at a company like this combine engineering and customer work. Solutions and systems engineers help operators design networks, sales and account teams manage relationships, project managers coordinate deliveries, and support engineers fix problems. Some roles are in the Learning Lab, where customers and partners are trained. If you enjoy maths, physics, computing, networks, or explaining technical ideas, optical networking is a field with real depth, and Ciena is one of the best-known names in it.
Website: www.ciena.com
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