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."

http://www.ciena.com

• 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.

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CenturyLink Readies NFV-Enhanced Service Launch with Cyan

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.

“CenturyLink has taken a leadership position in driving the changes required to build a more service- centric network that derives maximum value from network assets while addressing evolving customer requirements,” said Aamir Hussain, CTO, CenturyLink. “The Programmable Services Backbone delivers an open, software-enabled architecture based on Cyan’s NFV orchestration technology that will allow us to rapidly deploy new services to enterprise and SMB customers across our footprint.”

“CenturyLink is leading the network transformation movement that is so critical to the future of our industry,” said Mike Hatfield, president, Cyan. “We’re proud that Cyan’s Blue Planet is playing a critical role in how they deploy multi-vendor VNFs as services to end customers. Together, CenturyLink and Cyan are unifying the data center, virtual resources, WAN, and managed services to create a new way of doing business for network operators.”

http://www.centurylink.com
http://www.cyaninc.com/company/news-room/press-releases/2015/centurylink-to-offer-nfv-enhanced-services-to-enterprise-and-smb-customers-with-cyans-blue-planet-#.VQGtyPm-2-1

• In June 2014, CenturyLink sponsored an ETSI NFV ISG-approved proof of concept (PoC) solution based on RAD’s dedicated customer-edge D-NFV equipment running Fortinet’s Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) and Certes Networks’ virtual encryption/decryption engine as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) with Cyan’s Blue Planet system orchestrating the entire ecosystem. The companies said their D-NFV allows the placement of VNFs where they will be both most effective and least expensive, including at the customer edge.  Cyan's Blue Planet can orchestrate both NFV and multi-vendor Ethernet services.
  
  VNFs at the customer edge were implemented with RAD’s ETX-2, a D-NFV empowered NID, the cornerstone of RAD’s Service Assured Access solution. RAD's solution integrates an x86 server platform to host value-added service capabilities, as well as network functionalities that run on virtual machines.  Fortinet and Certes Networks provided VNFs that were instantiated on RAD’s ETX-2 by Cyan’s Blue Planet SDN Platform. Fortinet’s FortiGate-VM enforces next-generation firewall security functions that provide network and application layer protection. Real-time security updates are pushed to the FortiGate-VM by FortiGuard subscription services to ensure it is aware of and enforcing protection from the latest security threats.  The virtual Certes Enforcement Point (vCEP) is a virtual encryption solution that secures data in motion over any public or private network. vCEPs can be dynamically provisioned to create Certes’ CryptoFlow VPNs, fully meshed multi-point VPNs safeguarding data in physical, virtual and Cloud environments. CryptoFlows protect critical data for any application with automatically enforced policies and simplified control of encryption keys.

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Where is SDN today? Cyan's Steve West answers...

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RAD Joins Cyan Blue Orbit SDN Ecosystem

RAD is the latest company to join the Cyan Blue Orbit ecosystem of partners focused on multi-vendor SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV) applications.

RAD’s joining of Blue Orbit follows the recent completion by Cyan of end-to-end Ethernet services provisioning and "one-click OAM" as well as alarms and topology support for the RAD ETX-2. This integration enables network operators to have visibility and management of RAD platforms through Cyan’s Blue Planet SDN Platform.
 
“There is a lot of industry chatter around the promise of SDN/NFV, but when it comes down to it, carriers want proof beyond the hype to know our solutions can be successfully deployed,” said Yuri Gittik, Head of Strategic Marketing, RAD. “The Blue Orbit ecosystem allows us to test and demonstrate interoperability between our innovative solutions, including Distributed NFV, and other multi-vendor SDN solutions to ensure smooth infrastructure rollouts.”

http://www.cyaninc.com

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Cyan's Blue Planet SDN Digs into Multi-Vendor Network Inventory and Resources

Cyan introduced Planet Inventory, a multi-vendor network asset management application that forms part of the company's Blue Planet suite of software-defined network (SDN) applications.

Planet Inventory provides physical asset and logical resource management in complex, multi-layer, multi-vendor environments, including Cyan’s Z-Series family of packet-optical transport platforms, as well as equipment from a broad range of third-party network equipment suppliers. It includes a dynamic set of tools to browse collected data, including an advanced search-driven Object Browser, as well as a dynamic Object Graph, showing the relationships between various object types, such as cards, ports and services.

Cyan said accurate network asset information helps network operators reduce operating costs and accelerate service availability. Cyan’s Blue Planet SDN system provides a centralized orchestration service from which network operators can configure and manage network-wide services. Because Blue Planet has direct access to the equipment, the data it provides represents the true state of the network. Operators may use this network-side data for a variety of needs, including inventory management.

"Rapidly changing demands on networks is causing an increased emphasis on the performance and ROI of network assets. As a result, many network operators are asking for a clear, multi-vendor view of what is in their network and how it is performing. Our Planet Inventory application significantly improves their visibility," stated Michael Hatfield, Cyan's president,

Cyan will offer Planet Inventory both as a cloud-based service and as a locally-hosted implementation.

http://www.cyaninc.com

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Denmark's GlobalConnect Goes with Cyan for Regional Packet/Optical Upgrade

Cyan has landed another major customer in Europe.  GlobalConnect, a Danish alternative provider with a network spanning with 12,000 fiber route kilometers with extensions into northern Germany and southern Sweden, has completed the deployment of a 400G network employing the Cyan Blue Planet software-defined networking (SDN) system and Z-Series packet-optical platform throughout Denmark.

The network, which consists of some 40 wavelengths at 10 Gbps, allows GlobalConnect to deliver a wide variety of ultra-high-capacity wavelength and Ethernet services to enterprise customers and data center operators, as well as wholesale services to other carriers.


The rollout is anchored by Cyan Z-Series packet-optical transport platforms (P-OTPs). The Z-Series family, ranging from the compact, environmentally hardened 200Gbps Z22 to the high-capacity, 2.8Tbps Z77, provides a scalable, modular platform for delivering wavelength and Ethernet services at speeds up to 100Gbps. GlobalConnect employs Cyan Blue Planet, a complete SDN system, to more easily visualize, manage, and orchestrate services in complex multi-vendor environments.

Cyan said the automated packet/optical configuration capabilities and service flexibility of its platform were key to winning this project.  The company also noted that many of its deployments are now metro-regional in size.

“Many people think that the name of the game for service providers is simply adding more and more capacity. While capacity is certainly crucial, unless we can drive enhanced capabilities and features into our network we will suffer from bandwidth commoditization. Working with Cyan, we’ve been able to architect a next-generation network that is operationally more efficient, delivers the scalability we need, and provides a means to deliver enhanced services to our customers,” stated Peter Olsen, GlobalConnect chief technical officer.

http://eng.globalconnect.dk
http://www.cyaninc.com/en/

Cyan Completes its IPO

Thursday, May 09, 2013  Cyan, Financials, IPO, Optical, Packet/Optical  No comments

Cyan completed its initial public offering (IPO) and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol "CYNI". Mark Floyd, Cyan's Chairman and CEO, joined by members of the company’s management team, rang The Opening Bell on the NYSE. "Listing on the NYSE marks a major milestone for the company and I want to thank the entire Cyan team, without whose tireless efforts this could never have happened," said Mark Floyd, chief...

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Video: Where is SDN today? (part 2)

Thursday, April 18, 2013  Base Stations, NFV, OpenFlow, SDN, Video  No comments

Where does SDN stand today in Service Provider networks? 00:10 - Verizon -- Prodip Sen, Director, Network Architecture 01:45 - NTT Communications, Nayan Naik, Director, Product Strategy, Data Center, Services 03:17 - Telstra, Frank Ruhl, CTO 03:45 - Ericsson, Jan Haglund, VP, Product Area IP & Broadband 04:30 - Cyan, Steve West, CTO 05:29 - Overture - Michael Aquino, President and CEO 06:17 - Metaswitch,...

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