The US vendor announced its intention to acquire Cyan in May this year with an initial price tag of $400 million. The final amount paid by Ciena was approximately $488 million.
“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 at Ciena.
“We believe this acquisition advances our strategy to deliver a complete on-demand solution for virtualised networks and services, and greater control and choice for customers in an open ecosystem.”
Cyan’s Blue Planet division was key attraction for Ciena, and Mark Hatfield, former Cyan president, will take leadership of this unit as SVP at Ciena.
Blue Planet offerings include Planet Orchestrate and Planet Operate, as well as Ciena’s SDN multilayer WAN controller and network management tools.
“Ciena’s Blue Planet division will provide next-generation multi-vendor network management software and service orchestration solutions, for both physical and virtual network functions, to accelerate our customers’ network transformation strategies,” Hatfield said.
“Leveraging Ciena’s OPn architecture approach, Blue Planet solutions will reduce network operators’ reliance on closed, costly and complex vertically integrated infrastructures in favour of open, agile, software-controlled network environments.”
