Ciena Completes Acquisition of Cyan

Ciena completed its previously announced acquisition of Cyan, a supplier of next-generation software and platforms to enable open, agile and scalable software-defined networks, for approximately $488 million (or $415 million, net of estimated cash acquired) and inclusive of Cyan’s outstanding convertible notes on an as-converted basis, based on the closing price of Ciena’s common stock on July 31, 2015.

Ciena is unifying the software activities of both companies under a single brand and set of resources known as the Blue Planet division. The division, which includes Ciena’s former Agility business, will focus on helping customers automate services – from creation to orchestration to delivery – across both physical and virtual domains, in order to drive greater competitive advantage, create new revenue opportunities, and lower costs associated with hardware and operations. The Blue Planet portfolio offers a carrier-grade, multi-vendor SDN and NFV platform designed to automate, orchestrate, and manage the lifecycle of virtualized services across data centers and the WAN. It also includes a family of applications designed to control and manage both physical network elements and virtual SDN/NFV resources.

Mike Hatfield, formerly Cyan’s president, has been appointed to lead the Blue Planet division as a senior vice president of Ciena. The Blue Planet product portfolio includes Cyan's software applications, including Planet Orchestrate and Planet Operate, as well as Ciena's SDN Multilayer WAN Controller and its applications, V-WAN, Agility Matrix and network management solutions. The division is comprised of teams responsible for software development, product line management, product marketing, service and support, sales and business development.

"Ciena and Cyan make a great combination for our customers as they transform their networks with web-scale technologies to go beyond delivering capacity to create capabilities on demand," said Gary Smith, president and CEO, Ciena. "We believe this acquisition advances our strategy to deliver a complete on-demand solution for virtualized networks and services, and greater control and choice for customers in an open ecosystem."

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• Cyan was founded in 2006 and has approximately 260 employees worldwide. FY 2014 revenue amounted to $101 million. The company was based in Petaluma, California.

In March, Cyan confirmed that CenturyLink is preparing to launch NFV-enhanced services to enterprise and small and midsized business (SMB) customers based on Cyan’s Blue Planet NFV Orchestrator. Specifically, CenturyLink will use Cyan’s Blue Planet orchestration for their Programmable Services Backbone (PSB), its platform that for next-generation virtualized services to its customers.  Blue Planet NFV Orchestrator bridges multiple technologies to instantiate virtual network functions (VNF) from multiple vendors. Blue Planet will add these virtual network functions to CenturyLink’s network for quickly providing software-enabled services and ubiquitous service coverage to CenturyLink’s broad set of customers.

Cyan said its Blue Planet software can instantiate and control virtual functions, coordinate with physical and virtual network resources, and interconnect virtual functions (i.e., vFirewall, vDPI, vEncryption, vRouter, vDNS, etc.) to achieve service chaining. The programmability of the Blue Planet NFV Orchestrator allows carriers like CenturyLink to onboard and define new services through a flexible template-based architecture. The open architecture of Blue Planet’s NFV Orchestrator enables rich, multi-vendor environments within the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI), including support for different cloud management software and physical servers.