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Technology Stocks : Ciena (CIEN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Woody_Nickels who wrote (12454)	2/13/2010 10:46:51 AM
From: FJB	Respond to of 12623

Report: Ciena Scores at AT&T FEBRUARY 12, 2010 \| Craig Matsumoto lightreading.com; AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) appears to have picked Ciena Corp. (Nasdaq: CIEN) as a domain supplier for optical networking, handing Ciena an early payoff to its pending Nortel Networks Ltd. acquisition. In a note issued Friday afternoon, analyst Simon Leopold of Morgan Keegan & Company Inc. writes that Ciena appears to be AT&T's pick, beating out Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU), and Nokia Siemens Networks . Ciena would join Fujitsu Network Communications Inc. , which is believed to hold the other optical domain slot. AT&T launched the domain supplier idea in September, saying it would pick two vendors to supply each of several key segments. AlcaLu and Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC) were recently picked as the Long Term Evolution (LTE) suppliers, for example. (See AT&T Unveils Domain Supplier Strategy and AT&T Picks AlcaLu, Ericsson for LTE.) Ciena's agreement to buy Nortel's Metro Ethernet Networks assets was seen as a way to, among other things, secure one of those domain spots with AT&T. Leopold notes that AT&T has been using Nortel's WDM equipment. (See The Case for Ciena/Nortel.) A domain supplier spot comes as a mixed blessing, though; in fact, in a January note, Leopold wondered if it might be a "white elephant" for Ciena. The company would be expected to support Nortel's older, installed equipment, and it might not be able to cut some product lines, due to AT&T's interest in them. On the other hand, being a domain supplier offers a shot at winning more AT&T business, especially as the 100-Gbit/s generation arrives. AT&T has been Ciena's biggest customer, accounting for 20 percent of sales in 2009, Leopold writes. Leopold also notes that Ciena could probably keep selling CoreDirectors into AT&T even if it wasn't picked as a domain supplier. Ciena would just have to make those sales through another company.