Blue Planet (a Ciena Company)

Balaji Subramaniam, Director, Product Management, Blue Planet at Ciena, argues that human-centric, approval-based governance cannot keep pace with the scale and impact of AI-driven decisions in autonomous networks, so communications service providers need an evidence-based approach that reveals the consequences of overlapping AI actions, including blast radius and rollback scope. He explains how Ciena's config change management immutably captures who initiated an event, why, the context used, the AI's decisions, and the affected devices, embedding governance directly into the network for audits and reporting.

Balaji Subramaniam, Director, Product Management, Blue Planet at Ciena, argues that human-centric, approval-based governance cannot keep pace with the scale and impact of AI-driven decisions in autonomous networks, requiring an evidence-based approach that reconstructs and explains actions after the AI has taken them. He contends that operators must understand the consequences of continuous, overlapping AI decisions, including blast radius and rollback, and that governance must be embedded directly into the network so it can govern itself and present evidence of its actions.

John McVey, Global VP of Customer Success at Blue Planet (a Ciena Company), presents three key predictions for how the telecom industry shifts from automation to autonomy in 2026, including the critical need for accurate OSS data as a prerequisite for agentic AI, the advancement of autonomous network use cases from pilots to production environments, and the acceleration of legacy OSS decommissioning as CSPs retire decades-old mainframe systems that block AI capabilities. McVey emphasizes that winning networks in 2026 will be smarter, self-governing systems built to operate at machine speed as Blue Planet helps CSPs modernize their OSS environments to unlock measurable autonomy.

In this extended video, Jean-Phillippe Goyet, Sr. Director Product Management - AI at Blue Planet (a Ciena Company), describes how Blue Planet implements agentic AI through their AI Studio framework, which operates across three layers: agentic core, tooling, and applications. He describes how the Blue Planet platform spans inventory, orchestration, and assurance, bringing new capabilities to their service provider customers.

Jean-Phillippe Goyet, Sr. Director Product Management - AI at Blue Planet (a Ciena Company), outlines their two-pronged approach that provides out-of-the-box applications while enabling customer enrichment. He describes how they re-engineer and optimize existing processes to create new capabilities like instantiating dynamic network slices via natural language.

Gabriele Di Piazza, Vice President of Products, Alliances & Architectures at Blue Planet (a Ciena Company), discusses key Mobile World Congress trends including AI-driven infrastructure for network automation and digital twin technology for network simulation. He emphasizes how service providers are adopting data management layers while shifting toward cloud-native environments, highlighting the importance of building comprehensive ecosystems that unite network, OSS, and BSS players with developer communities.

Gabriele Di Piazza, Vice President of Products, Alliances & Architectures at Blue Planet, a Ciena Company, discusses the implementation of Network as a Service (NaaS) across various network segments, highlighting three core aspects: intent-based declarative orchestration, dynamic inventory capability, and AI-driven operations and assurance.

In this Extended Cut video, Gabriele Di Piazza, Vice President of Products, Alliances & Architectures at Blue Planet (a Ciena Company), discusses how Network as a Service (NaaS) addresses key challenges faced by carriers through automated service creation and delivery. He highlights the core components of NaaS, including intent-based orchestration and AI-driven operations, while emphasizing the growing carrier interest in NaaS for its ability to enable quick, on-demand services and new business models.