Cast your mind back to 2015. Big data and the Internet of Things were dominating the tech hype cycle. OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, was only founded in November. And the viral phenomenon of the year would be that dress … you know the one.

But for the team at Cyan, 2015 was the year everything changed. Ciena, which was subject to takeover talks itself – from Ericsson no less – moved to acquire the firm in a deal worth $400 million.

Blue Planet first became a part of Ciena’s portfolio in 2015 following the Cyan acquisition. At that time, Ciena combined its own software-defined networking (SDN) and automation services with the acquired technology to form the independent Blue Planet software unit.

In the decade following the acquisition, the parent would go on to spin the brand off into its own independent division while also expanding its offerings to include a DevOps toolkit for the platform and an analytics offering.

The Cyan team, meanwhile, found themselves rolled into Ciena’s Blue Planet division and would go on to support network operations for a host of firms, including Orange Business Services (now Orange Business), Windstream, and Dark Fibre Africa (DFA).

In the business world, 10 years is a long time. But Joe Cumello stayed with the brand throughout, now serving as SVP and GM of Blue Planet. SDxCentral sat down with him to reflect on the decade since the takeover, and to see what’s to come for the Ciena brand in the next.

Decade-defining moments

Cumello joined the then-independent Cyan back in 2012, amidst the SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV) revolution. By the time 2015 rolled around, those concepts were no longer new; instead, they were well-established in the enterprise space. The same was said for the team at Cyan, who had productized their initial software package to take advantage of SDN and NFV becoming more than trends.

That package would form the basis for Blue Planet, and just a few months later, it would find a new home with Ciena.

“From a defining moment standpoint, I'd say there's a couple of things that happened along the way,” Cumello said. “Number one was the industry deciding that it was going to tackle these complex operational problems with next-generation software technologies. That’s been evolving over the last 10 years. We don’t really call it SDN and NFV anymore. It’s agentic AI and autonomous networks. It's evolved quite a bit in 10 years, as technology does.

“Then, there have been a number of acquisitions over the years that Ciena made to add to the Blue Planet portfolio. We have a full suite of OSS technologies that carriers use to redefine their operations. And we’re growing fast, so things are going well for the business.”

With the years since seeing a maturing of the technology Blue Planet was helping to support, the Ciena exec outlined that software automation has made a meaningful contribution to running operations more effectively and more efficiently.

“Where you've gotten to today, the concept of the autonomous network and agentic AI, where there's sort of an acknowledgement that if we can get these things right, we can actually see some of the massive increases in efficiency and agility that we've been hoping for over the last sort of decade or so, and that's why everyone's so focused on getting that right right now, and that's why you see so much discourse in the industry about it.”

Stepping stone development

Compared to the Big data and IoT trends of 2015, AI has outclassed every tech hype cycle in recent memory in terms of clout, number of headlines, and everything in between.

Concepts Cumello talks about, like autonomous networks and agentic AI, are still early in the ever-flowing conversations around this technology.

However, the Ciena exec told SDxCentral he had no surprise about AI’s emergence, given what he described as a “stepping stone effect” in software development.

“For the last five years or so, maybe a little bit longer, we've been talking about data lakes and getting our data organized. So whether in the enterprise context or the service provider, it doesn't matter. Enterprises all around the world, no matter what vertical you're in, have been talking about getting their data sort of cleaned up and organized and into centralized data lakes.

“Now, if you look at that particular progression and the importance of that progression in terms of how people manage their operation or their enterprise, that led to the concept of saying, well, if my data is organized in a certain way in my back office, then I'm ending up with a centralized position or place, instead of it in 50 or 100 different applications or on separate servers, then maybe I can do something different with that information that led to AI.”

Essentially, the development of technology over the past decade was a gradual process, with one advancement leading to another, slowly, surely, leading to this eventual explosion around AI.

“A few years back, you couldn't really get AI and agentic going really well if you hadn't had the first step in the first place,” Cumello said. “And then you have the cloud players in the background, the advancements that they've been making and also Kubernetes developments in the background on being able to format data and put applications in the cloud. All these things are stepping stones to get us to the point we are at today.”

Here’s to the next decade

They say what goes around comes around, and the same goes for Cumello. The Cyan acquisition was the second time he ended up at Ciena, having joined the firm following its 2004 acquisition of Internet Photonics.

That first-hand knowledge helped when it came to settling the Blue Planet team. And in the years since, Cumello and team have gone from strength to strength.

In 2024, Ciena’s intelligent automation software division went on to achieve record revenues of $78 million – a 12% annual increase. Fast forward to its most recent earnings, Blue Planet would bring in $27.8 million for its fiscal third quarter ending August 2, a 2.3% increase year on year.

He put that positivity down to the company’s culture, adding: “I don't want that to sound like a cliché, but the company views its innovation through the lens of, how does it help the customer outcome? Whether it's the optical business or it's the Blue Planet business, it doesn't matter. It leans into innovation to create a great customer engagement and customer outcome. And that customer centricity leads to a really great working environment.”

So what does the next decade hold? Are we still going to be talking about AI? Will some new technology dominate the hype cycle?

Cumello told SDxCentral that AI will be there, but the concept of AI domains will be top of mind.

“I think we'll be asking ourselves questions around AI domains, and how do the AIs that run your operation communicate with each other? What's the governance over these domains, in terms of human governance over those systems? Do we need APIs, or something else, between our company and another company's automated system, and what's the governing body for that?”

“Cross-domain, cross-enterprise AI communications and APIs – we're nowhere near that today,” he added. “I can imagine a point in time where we're trying to figure out what are the lines between those systems in terms of how they run … cross-functional discussions between AI systems to make things better for us out in the workforce or at home.”