Ciena Corp. (Nasdaq: CIEN) shares fell sharply in after-hours trading on news that the company's revenues for its second quarter will fall short of targets.

"Due to Successful Cost Control and Expense Reduction Efforts, Expects Non-GAAP Loss Per Share Within Previous Guidance Range Despite Expectations of Lower-than-Anticipated Revenue," says a portion of the press release, just daring the reader to stay awake.

The translation: Revenue growth will be non-existent. Ciena had predicted sequential revenue growth of as much as 30 percent.

The company's shares fell $0.40 (14.5%) to $2.36 after-hours, after closing flat at $2.76 during normal trading on Tuesday (see Ciena Predicts Flat Q3).

Judging from some of the comments on the Yahoo Finance message board, the move wasn't exactly summoning forth glee: "SELL THIS ZOMBI!!!" read one message. "DELIST THIS PIG ITS A DISGRACE!" Positive (and literate) messages were hard to come by, though one lonely investor seemed to think the low stock price would spur a buyout. (Feel free to post your own carefully reasoned opinions on Light Reading's Ciena message board.)

Ciena thought it was going to report fiscal second-quarter revenues as high as $97.1 million. Analysts surveyed by Reuters Research expected Ciena to report revenues of $94.8 million. Unfortunately, Ciena is now saying its revenues are going to be closer to $75 million -- a full 21 percent off Wall Street's expectations.

The company expects that its loss per share will fall within a range of 24 cents to 26 cents. Its pro forma loss per share is expected to be in the range of 7 to 8 cents, better than Wall Street's anticipated loss of 32 cents a share.

CEO Gary Smith said half the revenue shortfall was due to two customers -- one service provider that pushed out a long-haul transport order and one carrier that delay its deployment of CoreDirector switches.

Adding to the fear, uncertainty, and doubt, Ciena blamed the revenue shortfall on "cautious spending and deployment delays by its large service provider customers, including a deceleration of DSL-related orders in North America."

Acquisitions caught a sliver of blame as well. "We experienced more disruption than anticipated in integrating Catena and Internet Photonics," Ciena's Smith said on a conference call.

Smith defended his company's strategic direction, but said that the timing of carrier spending is always tough to nail down. "There is no doubt, when you listen to carriers, that they're focus remains on rolling out high-bandwidth services to customers as quickly as possible," Smith said on the call. "Clearly we need to translate those opportunities to revenue against a backdrop that's anything but certain."

— Phil Harvey, News Editor, Light Reading