LINTHICUM, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 13, 2006--

   Major healthcare organizations including UC Davis Medical Center,
  Trinity Health (Novi, Mich.) and The Children's Hospital in Denver
       turn to Ciena for scalable, reliable and secure networks

Ciena(R) Corporation (Nasdaq: CIEN), the network specialist, today announced that it has become a member of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). With a steady increase in the adoption of Ciena's Adaptive WAN solution among healthcare organizations, including UC Davis Medical Center, Trinity Health (Novi, Mich.) and The Children's Hospital in Denver, Ciena is creating flexible wide area networks (WANs) to support a variety of healthcare-related technology applications, including business continuity, HIPAA compliance, remote storage extension and picture archiving communication systems (PACS).

HIMSS is a membership organization focused exclusively on providing leadership for the optimal use of healthcare information technology and management systems for the betterment of human health. As part of its new membership status, Ciena will be exhibiting in booth #7205 at the HIMSS 2006 Annual Conference & Exposition, February 12-15, 2006 in San Diego.

As the industry moves toward fully digital systems for clinical care, administrative and financial transactions, public health, professional education and healthcare/biomedical research, the volume and sensitivity of data for backup or on-going operations is growing and demand is increasing for time-sensitive access and backup to larger pools of information over longer distances. This trend is adding new pressures to these WAN environments, and healthcare enterprises are finding that traditional storage and networking technologies are not equipped with the necessary performance and reliability qualities.

Leveraging more than 12 years of engineering Layer 1 and Layer 2 networking platforms, Ciena brings carrier-class expertise to demanding healthcare environments with its Adaptive WAN solution, a wide area network that optimizes and switches traffic at the lowest possible layer to provide maximum throughput, flexibility, low latency and applications transparency. As a network that is always available, never drops packets and delivers deterministic response, Ciena's Adaptive WAN moves healthcare organizations beyond overlapping, single-application networks to a unified, scalable and high-performance network that supports time-sensitive, mission-critical applications and business processes.

"Ensuring real-time availability of patient data, which compounds daily, and compliance with regulations such as HIPAA were key drivers for building an optical network infrastructure versus storing and backing up data locally," said Alejandro Lopez, storage manager of UC Davis Medical Center. "With Ciena's networking technology, we have increased our network capacity for continued growth and return on investment, gained operational efficiencies through consolidation of several storage platforms and applications onto one network, and guaranteed security for our applications."

According to Albert Oriol, CISSP, Director of the IS Program Office and Privacy & Data Security Officer at The Children's Hospital in Denver, "With the deployment of the Electronic Medical Record organization wide, The Children's Hospital needed an effective disaster recovery solution that ensured availability of patient information to clinicians in the event of a disaster. Ciena's technology has enabled us to implement a remote failover architecture between our primary and secondary data centers that provides us faster recovery and a more cost-effective solution than traditional disaster recovery approaches. Ciena's storage extension technology has also been instrumental in building an infrastructure that will ensure we will not see a significant service interruption in our clinical systems while we relocate our primary data center from our current campus to our new state of the art hospital in 2007." Instead of having clusters at each site, The Children's Hospital in Denver is using Ciena's CN 2000(R) Storage Extension Platform to split clusters geographically across the network.

"With hospitals and healthcare facilities in seven states, our data centers reside in facilities that are hundreds of miles apart. Ciena's CN 2000 and ON-Center network management platform allow us to run multiple applications across more than 200 miles without suffering any of the usual pitfalls - network downtime, lost data or limited accessibility to patient information," said Bill Strutton of Trinity Health, based in Novi, Mich. As part of its disaster recovery initiative, Trinity Health is using Ciena's CN 2000 and ON-Center(R) Network Management Suite for storage, network and mainframe extension between data centers.

Several platforms in Ciena's Adaptive WAN solution, including the CN 4200(TM) FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform, the award-winning CN 2000 Storage Extension Platform, and ONLINE Metro(TM) Multiservice DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) platform, have earned qualification from major data storage specialists including IBM(R), EMC(R), Hewlett-Packard(R), Hitachi(R), McDATA(TM) and Brocade(R).

"Healthcare organizations are ideal for our Adaptive WAN solution given their high volume of time-sensitive communications that require secure and reliable transmission between multiple sites and across long distances," said Tom Mock, vice president of strategic planning at Ciena. "By joining HIMSS, we can work more closely with this industry to enhance interconnection among healthcare groups to improve patient care and clinical outcomes, help reduce malpractice risk, lower costs for insurance providers while increasing operational efficiency and better enabling regulatory compliance."

ABOUT CIENA

Ciena Corporation is the network specialist, focused on expanding the possibilities for its customers' networks while reducing their cost of ownership. The company's systems, software and services target and cure specific network pain points so that telcos, cable operators, governments and enterprises can best exploit the new applications that are driving their businesses forward. For more information, visit www.ciena.com.

NOTE TO INVESTORS

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 January 12, 2006. 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.

(R) All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

    CONTACT: Ciena Corporation
             Press Contacts:
             Nicole Anderson, 410-694-5786
             pr@ciena.com
             or
             Davies Murphy Group
             Christi Dean, 781-418-2430
             cdean@daviesmurphy.com
             or
             Investor Contact:
             Ciena Corporation
             Jessica Towns, 888-243-6223
             ir@ciena.com

    SOURCE: Ciena Corporation Ciena Corporation