YouSaid · the spoken record

Gary Smith

lines on the record: 81
first: 2025-01-27
most recent: 2025-01-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And then we have a dedicated team for the hyperscalers and cloud and an engineering team that works with them on the co-development and stuff of that kind of technology. So actually, I'm a great believer in simplicity of organizational design. So we have a very simple organizational structure that's evolved to address that. And that's how we're able to scale as quickly as we have.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been easier for us in some ways because we've always been the leading technology company. So it's really about who appreciates that technology and collaborates. So this shift to the submarine markets and to the cloud players generally has been a good fit for Siena because we move very quickly. We're at cutting edge technology. You know, the latest technology we have is actually on three nanometer chips. We were the first company in the world to have a three nanometer chip actually be used in the telecom space. And we're actually now working on our second. You know, we've got that out. It's carrying traffic around the world and we're now working on our second version of that. So we've always been at the leading edge of technology. So it really is a natural fit with these cloud players. And so we're organized very simply. We have, you know, a large service provider team around the world.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we had zero market share in there. Now we've got the main market share of with a leading player in connecting data centers and cloud players around the world. Submarine cables. Same kind of thing. I mean, our technology, you know, we really didn't focus on the submarine cables because there wasn't that much capacity being required. We've now got number one share in submarine cable connectivity around the world because they value very high speed capacity. And so, you know, the cloud players have gone from being very small percentage of our business to now both directly and indirectly over 50% of our business is now basically cloud and hyperscalers. So it's a very significant shift in the business. And that's really accelerated in the last five years.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The evolution has been such that the first appreciators for that kind of technology was obviously the service providers. And as the internet began to gain traction in sort of 2003, 2004, this whole sort of model, you began to see the cloud players get more interested in the network because if they're going to basically monetize and get to the eyeballs that they wanted, the network becomes actually important to them. And so there's been, I think,”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's going to lead us into the inevitable conversation we'll have about AI. But I just want to stay on this for one second. That verticalization from what we sell as virtualized compute capacity down to we will not own the cables in the ocean and verticalize our business and make sure we own it tip to tail. How has that changed your company? We're looking at, okay, there's WDM in 1997. This is the core innovation that lets us get more capacity out of the fiber networks. We're initially going to sell that to telecom companies, maybe to do more phone calls or the early internet. Now multiple generations in we're selling it directly to Google to connect data centers so that we might run AI workloads. It feels like that would have some pressure on your roadmaps and your go-to-market. How is that expressed?”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, if they're putting a data center in India and they want to connect it to North America, they want to own the connectivity for that. And it's a much higher speed. So they're not just buying the capacity nearly, they're actually taking control and owning the cables. So there's been a sort of an evolution of that over the last five years. First 10 years was, hey, we'll take the capacity. Now they want to actually own, you know, now their networks are made up of a hybrid of typically where they own the cable or they own some more, you know, they rent it from the service providers, but you've now got, I think, 600 plus cables around the world, submarine cables. You know, he got about one and a half million kilometers of fiber at the bottom of the sea, facilitating this. And the cloud players are really driving that. Marketplace now.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The cloud players A, purchasing the capacity of those submarine cables. And in the last more recent five years or so, you've seen Google actually begin to own many of these cables and Meta and others too to it. So it's evolved from, hey, it's all this service provider and it's just phone calls, you know, when you want to, you know, reach your aunt in Europe or in India or whatever, then it's just a phone call, which is a very small amount of data. The amount of data that's now being required by these cloud players is multiple more times than that. And you've got a lot of graphics going over it as well, which takes a lot of bandwidth. So the need for bandwidth has grown dramatically. And it sort of makes sense that the cloud players who want to connect their data centers.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that dynamic, I mean, you take the submarine cables as an example. It's a good proxy for what's happened here. From the 1980s right the way through to 2010, this was all funded by the service providers. So it was a way of getting transatlantic, you know, largely to Europe, a little bit to Asia, transatlantic phone conversations. And so they'd have these cables and they would get together as consortia between these companies like British Telecom, AT&T, and they would, you know, it was a syndicate, you know, fund these submarine cables. Now, with the advent of cloud, you know, you've got these players who wanted to have very high speed connectivity. If they're going to be in the European market, you take, for the example of, you know, Meta or Google or Microsoft or any of these players, they needed to have very high speed dedicated capacity. So you began to see in about 2000.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is the thing that I was talking about at the beginning it just seems so hard to understand and it's so interesting to talk to you about it because you're in it that the internet we experience is obviously changing the dynamics of the internet we build right so I experience my phone and there's a bunch of stuff happening on some data center owned by Google or Microsoft or whoever and that means those companies now own most of the capacity of undersea cables That chain of events, I think, is not intuitive, unless you're paying attention to it, but just talking to you for 13 minutes here, that seems very intuitive to you. It makes sense to you that they would have the capacity because I'm not sending nearly as much data as a consumer across the ocean. Do you see that changing? How fast has that grown? Like, describe that dynamic to me.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Technology developments that are specific to their networks, because these networks are now, you know, you look at the hyperscalers, some of the largest networks in the world. And they're very complicated, multi-continent, metro, long-haul, submarine cables. You know, the biggest players now, the biggest owners of capacity on submarine cables is actually the cloud players. And that used to be the traditional service providers. But now it's the likes of Google and Meta, et cetera, that really own a lot of the global capacity on those submarine cables.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a very integrated partnership. You know, most of the major carriers, I think 96% of the major carriers around the world are Siena customers. So it's a collaboration that we've worked on for multiple decades. And we help manage the networks. We do a lot of the installation work for them. We do the planning. We have the technology, the software that actually manages the network as well and looks for predictive issues of challenges and switches automatically if there are problems on certain fibers. It will detect that and switch it through. So there's a lot of underlying technology and collaboration between us in all the service providers and also all of the hyperscalers, you know, pretty much all of the hyperscalers use Sienna to connect their data centers around the world. And we partner with them as well on.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's our ability to continue to drive that. You know, when we first started, you know, we could multiplex, keep it very simple. And that was revolutionary at the time, and many of the carriers we went to with that said, oh, that's fantastic, we'll never need more than that. And then we figured out how to do eight, then 16, then 32, then 64, and then, you know, we're way, way beyond that now. So what that means is, you know, you have that single piece of fiber that looks like 64 fibers. And that's enabled this massive scaling of the architecture around the world. And then we deploy that technology, not just in the local connectivity, but in the long distance, you know, cross country, then across whole continents, 8,000, 10,000 mile submarine cables. We can support that kind of capacity across the submarine cables.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“WDM, you've been running it since 1997, right? This is the technology bet of the company. Is it the capacity of WDM where you're using multiple wavelengths of light across a single fiber? Is it that what's doubling?”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talking about scaling faster than Moore's Law, which is roughly a doubling every 18 months. Decoder listeners are very pedantic. They will tell me that's not actually what Moore's law means, but I think that's how you're using it. And I appreciate our listeners very much. I think that's not what I don't think that quite applies here, but you're talking about a doubling of bandwidth every 18 months. That's what that feels like.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. Now, you know, there are technology developments within the fiber, you know, for sure, you know, that help and assist that. And there's been a lot of that development from companies like Corning in the fiber world. But it's basically the magic is the technology that goes on the end of those fibers. Because when you think about it, if we had to scale by digging up the place every time we wanted to put more fibers in, then it's just not practicable. But, you know, even on old fibers, you know, we can get a tremendous amount of expansion and virtual capacity by just putting our technology on the end of it.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Always been explained to me that the fiber is the fiber. We're just sending light back and forth, and it's the pieces at the end that actually create the additional bandwidth, that create the additional capability. Is that more or less true? Are you really just focused on the bits at the end that talk to each other?”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the virtualization? So, where you've got one piece of fiber, it makes it look like multiple fibers. And we can, depending on the distance and what you're putting down it, it can be hundreds of fibers, which is actually physically manifested as a single fiber. And so, you know, you don't need to put more fibers into the ground, et cetera. You can just, you know, with the technology we have either end of it, scale it up. So it's the virtualization of fiber, which has really enabled this almost seamless marriage between the applications, to your point, the driving of all the network traffic with the actual network. And, you know, we've grown through our technology development the ability to go do that faster than Moore's Law. So, you know, we now have a new piece of technology, call it WaveLogic Technology, that can do one.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Core piece of technology where you're multiplexing and virtualizing the single piece of fiber, right? That was Sienna's sort of big technology bet. I believe it's called WDM. Explain that to people just very quickly.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A hair thread in weight and distance. Basically, we can multiply that many, many times. So hundreds of virtual fibers because of the technology that we use around it. And that's enabled the whole scaling of the internet. It's enabled the scaling of this global connectivity phenomenon that we have. And it's at the center of scaling for AI connectivity now and into the future as well.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We basically don't run the network. Those are the service provider carriers, and they can be, you know, if you take North America as an example, there's hundreds of carriers that do the, you know, the local last mile piece out in the rural areas. And then there's obviously the Verizons, Comcasts, AT&Ts of this world that then facilitate all of that connectivity to the consumer and to most of the enterprises. We provide the technology that powers their networks, basically. And so for them to get that high speed connectivity, it's Cienna's technology that goes on the ends of those fiber cables that allow the speed and throughput and continue to drive the capacity. And what we basically do down a single piece of fiber, we virtualize that fiber, Elay. So instead of having that little thread, you know, which is about...”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me, ask with the networks. Let's say I want to build a network. In some rural part of the country, do I just call CNN and say, all right, we're going to get to work, go dig some trenches. Do I run the network? Do you run the network? How does that work?”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which one table to get stimulated and to be sustainable until they had large amounts of dependable connectivity? And so it's, you know, it's constantly evolving where, you know, you've got applications that are demanding much higher bandwidth. We're into an era of that now with AI for sure. And then the networks have to kind of catch up and facilitate that.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, that wouldn't be available if you couldn't get instant response to it. Now, 20 years ago, that would not have been possible as a business model. And, you know, there's an interesting point in time here, Nile, where there was this massive overbuild of fiber capacity in the early 2000s. And it was sort of the telecom nuclear winter then where we had more capacity than apparently we'd need for the next two decades. And people built out all of these large fiber networks and sort of no one came. But they did really because that enabled business models to take large amounts of bandwidth at low cost. And that created business models like Amazon.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because it's the piece that connects all of this stuff, everybody focuses on things like AI right now, or be it the Netflix or whatever. And it's just how do you get those things to manifest itself to the consumer and to enterprise, the reality of that is it requires a massive buildout over the last two decades for that fiber infrastructure, basically that connects all these data centers together, that connects them through submarine cables, connects them across countries. And it's got the intelligence on it to be able to know where to go get that information. And that has evolved over the last two decades and continues to be evolved because you think about some of the business models that we now take for granted, you know, like Uber.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And actually talk to those servers. I guess what I'm trying to understand is there's the consumer application layer of the internet. We're all going to watch a bunch of Instagram reels or something. And then there's the internet we need to build to support that. What's the relationship between those two? How often do you think, okay, I see the next set of applications that are coming on phones or I see the next set of devices that people might want to use? Or I see the rise of streaming services. We had better start building an internet that can support it because that dynamic often seems subsumed and maybe some cell carrier conversations or maybe some data center conversations are very rarely I think comes to the forefront.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The part that I really want to dig into, I think sort of intellectually, I've always understood that. I think most people understand that there are servers and data centers elsewhere, and we are communicating with them.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the physical fiber cables and the networks that go around the world for that. And if you have an inquiry depending on what it is that requires a different continent, that goes down through the cell tower and out across the sea and back to you. But, you know, that's all invisible to us all. And we're able to do it at such high speeds now that it's transparent to the applications that you're using.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We consume most of the internet now, you know, in a mobile form, you know, on your iPads or iPhones, whatever, you know, we still have some desktops, but it's all laptops. The first point of connectivity there is mobile. So, you know, it's available to us all the time. But what we don't think about is it's only mobile until it's not. And basically, you know, it needs to get terrestrialized to the nearest basically area where it comes down into the terrestrial typically fiber to get really high speed, you need to use fiber. You know, wireless has, you know, some limitations around that. So basically, until it gets to any mobile application, it's really objective is to get terrestrial and to that cell tower as quickly as possible. And then from the bottom of the cell tower, basically is when all the magic starts.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Always think about it as two internets, right? There's the internet we experience, the digital internet, and then there's the very physical internet, the actual cables and wires that connect our networks together, that connect us together. That is Sienna's business, right? We're running these cables, figuring out how to move data across the more quickly, figuring out how to move more data across them. Sienna's been around for a minute. How is the dynamic between what people are doing on the digital internet most consumers experience? And what you need to do on the physical internet change because it seems like something we don't ever really get to talk about. I'm very curious to ask you about”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, Siena is the leading technology company in the world for providing high speed connectivity. So you think about all the networks that have been enabled around the internet, et cetera, around the world, submarine cables, as you alluded to. Ciena is really the driving force behind that high-speed technology. Even mobile connectivity, terrestrial connectivity, submarine cable connectivity. And we're basically the best in the world at moving optical bits.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Am very excited to talk to you, the Dakota team and I were talking earlier. We love stories of hidden companies that run the world and Sienna very much feels like one of those companies. It is a huge player in networking. It's a huge player in the future of our networks. There's some AI to talk about. There's undersea cables to talk about, which is always fun. Quickly for everyone, describe what Sienna is and what it is you do.”
2025-01-27 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ciena keeps the internet online, with CEO Gary Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT