Ciena Vectors 2025

Ciena’s Vectors event takes place every two years, and it is an opportunity for customers to visit the company’s R&D labs in Ottawa, Canada for technical demonstrations and updates from the engineering team. This event is technology dense – one where the marketing team sometimes needs to speak up and say to the presenting engineer, “Hey don’t skip my marketing slide!”. The entire Vectors runs for 5 weeks, and it draws customers from all over the world. Sales, marketing, and engineering teams have valuable discussion opportunities with undistracted customers.

This year’s Vectors leaned into components and line systems more than in the past, with less emphasis on the traditional transponders. It’s clear that Ciena is transitioning to make Telecom and Datacom components a larger part of its business. This report is a summary of the key takeaways and observations from Ciena Vectors 2025.

Refer to Cignal AI’s Ciena Vectors 2023 report for a blast from the past. Ciena ended up hitting the predicted and aggressive date for WL6E hardware in 1H24; impressive.