“When we took a look at how much our application development staff
was actually supporting the interfaces, stitching these things together, it
was easily 10 percent of our time.”
—Mark Temple, Applications Manager, Ciena
orchestrate the Agile-based business processes across the
enterprise applications—offered a potential solution. When
James Donley, vice president and CIO at Ciena, investigated
this option, however, he found that Oracle didn’t have a
prebuilt connection for the design-to-release process that
would connect the two applications. Fortunately, Oracle was
looking to build one, and Ciena’s unique
integration issues made it the perfect
candidate for a new program designed
to bring enterprise IT challenges closer
to Oracle’s developers and integration
partners. Although working with this
“early adopter” program added time to
the project, it saved Ciena money and
gave the company extensive access to the
Oracle development teams—and to the
sort of prebuilt integration the network
specialist required.
“We had the luxury of having something broken,” says
Donley, a seemingly contrary motivation for Ciena to embrace
the program. Yet today, the company can deliver better service
to its customers and has lowered IT overhead by leveraging Agile Product Lifecycle Management Integration Pack for
Oracle E-Business Suite for Design to Release, the process integration pack (PIP) developed with Ciena’s input.
HOLDING THE LINE
Getting enterprise software to work together and applications
to communicate effectively over a network is often an enormous challenge. If components come from a variety of firms, IT
systems can run the gamut from complicated to cryptic. Even if
all components come from the same vendor, differences in versions, customizations, local preferences, and internally developed programs can all throw off operations.
As companies rely on data to make critical decisions,
managers need to access information relevant to their
job role, as quickly as possible and in a usable format.
Simplified integration improves business processes to
increase the visibility of accurate enterprise information.
But it can also highlight additional integration issues that
hinder visibility. If it is discovered that each application
speaks a slightly different language, different groups in
the organization may label their data differently, making it
difficult to synthesize and use enterprise information. “In
large organizations, especially those that grew over many
years or through acquisitions, this is very painful,” says Joe
Barkai, practice director at IDC Manufacturing Insights in
Framingham, Massachusetts.
Ciena’s management found itself in exactly that situation.
Ciena’s growth is powered by acquisitions and the demands
of large telecommunications customers. In fact, the IT group
has been known to grow 30 percent quarter over quarter
in busy times—but this growth is not
predictable or steady. Ciena needed
the ability to increase the flexibility of
its business processes to improve inte-
gration. “When we do an acquisition,
we’re looking to get that data cleaned
up and in the right place, out of the
gate,” Donley says.
But due to Ciena’s mix of products,
much of Donley’s effort was focused
on keeping the applications running
at peak performance. “When we took
a look at how much our application development staff was
actually supporting the interfaces, stitching these things
together, it was easily 10 percent of our time either maintaining integrations or fixing problems from integrations,”
says Mark Temple, applications manager at Ciena.
Fortunately, Ciena’s heterogeneous IT environment began
to coalesce around a single vendor: Oracle. “We didn’t start
out as a huge Oracle shop,” Donley says. “But over time and
based on acquisitions done by Oracle, we now have a significant piece of our business running on Oracle tools. We are
running [Oracle E-Business Suite] 11. 5. 10, but we also have
[Oracle’s] Agile, Hyperion, and Siebel applications.”
At Ciena, the Agile PLM system is where bill of material
and product item information is stored and managed. More
than half the company’s employees are engineers or salespeople who rely on these applications every day to grow
revenue. Also, Ciena outsources most of its manufacturing,
so engineering data plays an essential role in the business.
“We feed it over to our Oracle E-Business Suite, which
drives our whole supply chain and customer relationship
databases,” says Temple. “Having good data to drive the
supply chain is critical.”
>>SNAPSHOT
Ciena
www.ciena.com
Revenue: US$902.4 million
Employees: 2,203
Oracle products: Oracle E-Business
Suite 11. 5. 10; Oracle’s Agile,
Hyperion, and Siebel applications
Partner: Sierra Atlantic
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Clearly, connecting data and applications together is a
high priority for Ciena. Fortunately, the Oracle Application
Integration Architecture offering was designed to help IT
processes and data sync effectively. Components of the solu-
