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Ciena's (CIEN) Blue Planet to Augment BT Digital Offerings

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Blue Planet, an operating business division of Ciena Corporation (CIEN - Free Report) , recently secured a contract for undisclosed amount from British multinational telecommunications firm BT Group plc to augment the digital experience of end users. In particular, the state-of-the-art automation software from Blue Planet is likely to enhance the speed for enterprise customers for a seamless access to BT Group’s cloud-based collaboration tools.

The Blue Planet software offers key insights into the network to enable service providers optimize business processes spanning IT and Network functions. This, in turn, accelerates digital transformation within an organization by empowering closed-loop automation through multi-domain, multi-layer orchestration. With improved analytics skills and route optimization, it helps unlock network potential and improves business agility. Working across multi-vendor domains, the automation software facilitates the delivery of end-to-end services with fast time to market at reduced operational costs.

BT Group aims to leverage these service capabilities to offer superior end-user experience by eliminating the need for human intervention. In addition, AI-powered network analytics is likely to improve its operational efficiency and help it shape the digital transformation across the business by enabling mission-critical business processes to adapt and evolve according to consumer demand.

The expansion of the Blue Planet software business and its network automation capabilities has provided Ciena with competitive differentiation. It also helped the company extend its intelligent automation capabilities beyond Layer 0 to 2 into Layer 3, with new features to support a broader range of closed-loop automation and optimization use cases across multilayer, multivendor networks.

The fundamental demand drivers of Ciena’s business, including increased network traffic, demand for bandwidth and the adoption of cloud architectures remain strong. The company possesses one of the largest optical R&D (research and development) investment capacity in the industry, which enables it to deliver leading innovation with the best time to market. It has a world-class specialized sales force that is focused on customers. The company has added several new products and capabilities to its 5G Network Solutions aimed at reducing network complexity and fueling operators’ migration from 4G to 5G.

Ciena has been diversifying its footprint in data-center connectivity. This has enhanced its reach into a broader end-to-end optical and data-equipment market. It is increasingly investing in the data and optical fiber market to cash in on the tremendous growth opportunity presented by bandwidth demand from network service providers. Network upgrades by telecom carriers to meet demand bode well for the company’s long-term prospects. Currently, it is one of the leading suppliers of 40G and 100G optical transport technology. The company is making efforts to expand its Web Scale IT Architecture in the enterprise market by launching products like new chipsets, metro architecture and mobile backhaul solutions.

We remain impressed with the inherent long-term growth potential of this Zacks Rank #4 (Sell) stock. Some better-ranked stocks in the broader industry are Aviat Networks, Inc. (AVNW - Free Report) and Ubiquiti Inc. (UI - Free Report) , both sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), and Clearfield, Inc. (CLFD - Free Report) carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Aviat delivered a positive earnings surprise of 11.8%, on average, in the trailing four quarters.

Ubiquiti has a long-term earnings growth expectation of 18.4%. It delivered a positive earnings surprise of 27.9%, on average, in the trailing four quarters.

Clearfield delivered a positive earnings surprise of 44.3%, on average, in the trailing four quarters.

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