Ciena is a solid company. Long history; reliable, but it just swallowed a huge division of Nortel.

Congratulations to Ciena for winning the auction of Nortel’s Metro Ethernet division. It is a huge acquisition for Ciena; doubling the size of the company. In fact it is so huge I am concerned Ciena cannot manage the merger integration effort properly.

According to Ciena, their existing customer base and Nortel’s customer base do not overlap, which means that Ciena can sell into the Nortel base and Ciena’s new division can sell into the old Ciena customer base.

Ciena knows the space; probably better than Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN). However, sometimes knowledge is not enough. Sometimes size does matter. Don’t get me wrong, Ciena may be able to pull it off but it will require it to do two things – don’t get too cocky and pay attention to the details of the integration effort. I have seen plenty of deals go belly up simply because the acquirer thought the work was over once it won the bid. Guess what? Major mistake.

My suggestion to Ciena; come up with a good merger integration plan.