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Ciena adds Barnard to senior management team in Australia

Announcement posted by Ciena 11 Aug 2010

Ciena® Corporation (NASDAQ: CIEN), the network specialist, is continuing to grow its presence in Australia with the appointment of Simon Barnard as its new Account Director for Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania.
Ciena Corporation (NASDAQ: CIEN), the network specialist, is continuing to grow its presence in Australia with the appointment of Simon Barnard as its new Account Director for Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania.

Barnard will be immediately responsible for managing Ciena’s existing customer accounts south of the New South Wales border, including VERNet, which operates the major educational research network VERN, and Nextgen Networks, of which Barnard was among the original founders.

“We’re in the midst of a global trend in the telecommunications industry to collapse the number of network layers in the quest for better performance, scalability and efficiency,” says Barnard. “Optical and Ethernet are the two critical technologies that enable the best mix of performance and cost-effectiveness for carrier and enterprise networks everywhere, including Australia, and the fact that Ciena is a global leader in these areas makes it an attractive and exciting time to join the company.”

Barnard says the biggest challenge facing telecommunications carriers, service providers and large enterprises in Australia is managing the deluge of bandwidth demands driven from multimedia-hungry users.

“Carriers are seeking different and better ways to manage growing volumes of network traffic, and this need will be magnified even further as data usage goes through the roof over the next few years,” he says. “Likewise, corporate customers are seeking cost-effective, high capacity, low-latency network connectivity without sacrificing reliability for mission-critical applications such as electronic trading, cloud computing, storage area networking and disaster recovery.

“Converged optical Ethernet is a highly compelling solution in this scenario, primarily for its simplicity and scalability as well as its ubiquity. That’s why major infrastructure projects like the NBN are blue-printed on Ethernet and optical technologies, and this is where Ciena has both the expertise and global experience to take a leadership role in the local market.”      

Prior to joining Ciena, Barnard was a Regional Director at Extreme Networks, the US-based, NASDAQ-listed Ethernet switching technology developer. Previously, Barnard was the National Sales Manager for Nextgen Networks, where he started the company’s corporate and government business, and developed the channel business for the company’s system integrators. He was also a Business Development Manager for Cisco Australia, where he worked on carrier, corporate and government accounts, and an Account Director at Lucent.

Together with Stephan Wagner, who was appointed last month to head up Ciena’s northern region operations, Barnard will focus on growing the company’s customer base in Australia by servicing and supporting existing customers and bidding for new business.

Barnard holds a Bachelor of Science (Honours) degree from the University of Reading, United Kingdom. He has worked in the Australian telecommunications industry for the past 17 years, and is based in Melbourne.