Ciena India, one of the leading global research and development (R&D) centres for Ciena® Corporation (NASDAQ: CIEN), the network specialist, today announced the appointment of Kanwal Jawanda, a veteran telecom engineering professional, as its Vice President, Engineering.
With more than 20 years of rich experience in the telecommunication industry, Kanwal will serve as a significant leader to Ciena India’s research and development (R&D) team. In this capacity, he will drive the evolution of Ciena’s world-class R&D center in Gurgaon. Also as part of his role, Kanwal will lead the end-to-end product development for several Ciena solution sets, which are utilized worldwide by leading telecom carriers, cable operators, enterprises, research institutions and government agencies.
Kanwal began his career in 1986 as a Design Engineer with Amdahl Communications (Toronto, Canada), where he was engaged in the development of high-speed digital multiplexers for Bell Canada and various US-based telecom carriers. In 1990, he joined Newbridge Networks (Ottawa, Canada) as a Senior Design Engineer, working on access products, including the introduction of ISDN functionality to the subrate multiplexer product line and the development of the inverse multiplexing Transmission Access Processor (TAP 3500). His key contribution during a ten-year tenure at Newbridge was in the architecture design of an ATM switch (36170 Mainstreet) – a flagship product for Newbridge that dominated the ATM market in late nineties. As a result of these achievements, Kanwal made a significant contribution to Newbridge becoming a USD $2 billion company from USD $100 million in ten years.
In 2000, when Newbridge was acquired by Alcatel, Kanwal assumed various roles and responsibilities in the R&D environment, and last held the position of Director R&D in Alcatel’s Broadband Access Division (Ottawa, Canada), where collaborated across multi-site design centres in Ottawa, Antwerp, Raleigh, Shanghai and Bangalore. In this capacity, he was responsible for developing an IP DSLAM platform and related infrastructure for the IPTV service roll-outs at SBC and BellSouth.
Just prior to joining Ciena India, Kanwal led a team of 150 R&D engineers at Wipro, providing design services to tier one telecommunication equipment companies.
Speaking on the appointment, Mr Neeraj Gulati, Managing Director, Ciena India said, “India is increasingly looked upon as the top destination for research and development by major global telecom equipment companies and their customers. Our Gurgaon-based development centre leverages the strong engineering talent and knowledge of professionals in this region to bolster the global R&D efforts of Ciena.”
Mr Gulati added: “With Kanwal taking charge of Engineering at this centre, we are confident that Ciena’s Indian R&D team will benefit greatly from his vast knowledge in product development and innovation, as well as from his management experience and extensive background in collaborative multi-site R&D.”
Commenting on his appointment, Kanwal said, “I am excited to contribute to Ciena India’s growing communications R&D influence in India, and am looking forward to increasing this centre’s share of Ciena’s global R&D efforts in new product development and innovation.”
Kanwal earned a MS degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and holds patents in the communications arena. His expertise encompasses areas of system architecture, hardware and software design, resource planning and project management, among others.
