Joe Marsella has been promoted to chief technology officer for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), at Ciena where he will lead a group of engineers and developers in driving Ciena’s expansion in the region.
By providing strategic counsel to Ciena customers and partners, Marsella will help them transform their networks through key technologies such as software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV) to enable agility, innovation, and differentiation in service offerings while lowering overall network costs.
With more than 20 years of experience in the software and telecoms industry, Marsella has expertise in both packet and optical networking, including detailed knowledge on SDN, NFV, photonics, dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM), optical transport networks (OTN), Carrier Ethernet and control planes.
Prior to this new role, Marsella served in several capacities within Ciena; most recently as the senior director of Product Line Management, responsible for the software strategy of Ciena’s Agility software portfolio, now part of Ciena Blue Planet. He also held leadership positions in Ciena’s product line management and R&D organisations, providing expertise and direction in key vertical markets and product portfolios.
“Increasing demand for high-bandwidth services and applications – from cloud computing and virtualisation, to data centre interconnect (DCI) and video – are having an impact on our customers, partners and their end-users,” said Marsella. “Strategic networking solutions that take advantage of emerging technologies, such as SDN and NFV, ensure that are ready to adapt, bring new services to market and extract the most value from the network.”
