When Ciena came calling 15 years ago, Jim Moylan didn’t know a great deal about the industry. Part of the appeal of the role was working with Ciena CEO, Gary Smith. Indeed, he counts Smith as one of three great mentors he has had the benefit of working with throughout his career. Commenting on his time working with Smith he said ‘He's a master at communication. One of the things that he does is he prepares, and I've never seen anybody who was as diligent in preparation for communication. Because sometimes I like to just speak my mind and that's not necessarily the right thing.”
When he joined back in 2007, Moylan thought that whilst the job was a good opportunity, he didn’t expect Ciena to be around for long when up against industry titans like Cisco and Nortel. Fast forward some years Nortel sadly faced bankruptcy and Ciena had the opportunity to buy one of the divisions.
Nowadays Moylan believes that whilst Ciena might not quite be number one market share, they are major players in the market. Indeed, Moylan credits the acquisition as one of the most significant deals he has worked on throughout his extensive career. He said, “It was a great experience it took about two and a half years. I didn't do it by myself of course, it was a whole company effort. We made this acquisition out of bankruptcy, which was incredibly complicated. There was a carve out - meaning that it was done by a subsidiary to carve it out from the company, Nortel. We had to put them back together, spend the money to fix it and take the costs out.”
A veteran of the energy industry, Moylan believes the key to the success of any business lies in staying close to the customer and learning from their behaviour. He said, “I have been exposed to lots of business, and I learned something from each. One of the most important things about learning about a business is to get close to customers and spend time with them. I have a natural curiosity and I love to be involved with customers.
“We've been through a very disruptive period over the last few years, covid disrupted the supply chain and now with everything that’s happening in the world we can see disruptions to the supply chain again. We're watching the signal from our customers very carefully as we come out of this period. How will they behave and what will be their ordering pattern? So just now I’m really watching closely the signal from our salesforce.
“But our customer demand is still strong. This year we are looking at around 18 to 22% in revenue growth. We started well and we're about to announce our third quarter. We're right on track to hit our 8% CAGR compound annual growth rate and revenue for the past 10 years. The industry is growing at about three to 5 per cent.”
Ciena announced their financial results for the third quarter last month They reported revenue of $1.07 billion as compared to $868.0 million for the fiscal third quarter 2022. Ciena's GAAP net income for the fiscal third quarter 2023 was $29.7 million, or $0.20 per diluted common share, which compares to a GAAP net income of $10.5 million, or $0.07 per diluted common share, for the fiscal third quarter 2022.
As a result of the last few years Moylan is working on some key changes. “We have some big projects as a company that will change how we work. One is looking at our supply chain. We learned during the supply chain upset that we must have a more fully formed and capable supply chain information system and process. So, one of our main projects is digitalising it.
“Another key focus for us is the management of data. It's been something that we've been working on for a couple of years but with the big increase in the cybersecurity threats it makes it important to know where your data is, how protected it is and all the things that impact security as well as data management. We want one source of truth that everybody accesses and that's what the project is about.
“The final project we are working on is the ‘order to cash’ process, which is essentially the process from when an order is placed to the time we receive the cash. Currently we to try to deal manually with the very diverse needs of our customers. We think we can simplify that process a lot. We can make many of manual processes automatic and through the system. That's going to take probably three years by the time we get through all the steps, but it's very exciting because it will bring us into the 21st century.
Over his career Moylan has bore witness to incredible periods of change, not just to the industry but how the work force has altered in response to global events like the pandemic.
“Covid changed the way we work in a big way. Working from home is very flexible. I can schedule time better if I have a dental appointment or need to go exercise. I can schedule my life in a way that I'm not sort of stuck into the office. Technology has been a great help. Because with mobile devices, you can work just about anywhere, which I think is wonderful.”
