Ciena Appoints Marcus Starke as Chief Marketing Officer

Ciena® Corporation (NYSE: CIEN), the network specialist, today announced that Marcus Starke joined the company as Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Starke will oversee all global marketing and communications activities of the company.

“Marcus will bring strong leadership to our world-class marketing and communications organization to deliver clear value propositions for Ciena and our growing portfolio that is designed to help our customers shift to on-demand and cloud-based business models. In particular, his experience with software positioning and exposure to the needs of the enterprise market, combined with his expertise in state-of-the-art marketing and communications techniques, will help intensify our efforts in further building our brand and reputation as we expand into new markets,” said Gary Smith, president and CEO of Ciena.

Reporting directly to CEO Gary Smith, Starke joins Ciena with more than 25 years of global marketing and communications experience across a diverse set of industries including technology, consumer products and professional services. He most recently served as Chief Marketing Officer at MicroStrategy, a leading global provider of enterprise-ready platforms for business analytics and mobile analytics. Prior to that, Starke was Senior Vice President, Worldwide Marketing and Communications at SAP, the global market leader in enterprise application software. Earlier in his career, Starke was President and CEO (Europe, Middle East and Africa) for Wunderman, as well as Chairman and CEO of the German arm of Publicis Worldwide.

Starke holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University in Mannheim, Germany. He also completed the Chief Marketing Officer Program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and the Marketing University at Harvard Business School.

About Ciena

Ciena (NYSE: CIEN) is the network specialist. We collaborate with customers worldwide to unlock the strategic potential of their networks and fundamentally change the way they perform and compete. Ciena leverages its deep expertise in packet and optical networking and distributed software automation to deliver solutions in alignment with its OPn architecture for next-generation networks. We enable a high-scale, programmable infrastructure that can be controlled and adapted by network-level applications, and provide open interfaces to coordinate computing, storage and network resources in a unified, virtualized environment. For updates on Ciena news, follow us on Twitter @Ciena or on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/company/ciena. Investors are encouraged to review the Investors section of our website at www.ciena.com/investors, where we routinely post press releases, SEC filings, recent news, financial results, and other announcements. From time to time we exclusively post material information to this website along with other disclosure channels that we use.

Note to Ciena Investors

Forward-looking statements. This press release contains certain forward-looking statements based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements are based on information available to the Company as of the date hereof; and Ciena's actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied, due to risks and uncertainties associated with its business, which include the risk factors disclosed in its Report on Form 10-K, which Ciena filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on December 19, 2014. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding Ciena's expectations, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future and can be identified by forward-looking words such as "anticipate," "believe," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "should," "will," and "would" or similar words. Ciena assumes no obligation to update the information included in this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.