Nokia’s advantage over Ciena is its vertical integration. Ciena is, for instance, heavily dependent on InP lasers purchased from Lumentum.
Additionally, Nokia has a ready product for inside the data center, namely the ICE-D. Ciena has been strong in pluggable products, but I’m not sure how ready they are for the inside of data centers. They don’t have component-level manufacturing like Nokia does. Nokia, on the other hand, has repeatedly emphasized their specialization at this level, with PIC (Photonic Integrated Circuit) expertise being essential. I suspect that in future CPO (Co-Packaged Optics) development, Lumentum will be involved regarding InP lasers, at least in the initial phase. But Nokia could be in a strong position regarding PIC engines, meaning this ready ICE-D product. The market doesn’t seem to anticipate this at all right now, IF this is indeed the case. But then what is Ciena’s role in this; can they get involved at the component level at all, as internal optical development in data centers is, in my view, heading in that direction?
By the way, I’m under the impression that Nokia’s FP5/FP6 is not suitable for the inside of data centers, at least currently. They are silicon-based (Silicon Photonics), and they don’t withstand heat as well as InP. So Nokia’s current pluggables development comes mainly through Infinera as InP-based—namely ICE-X.