Ciena to Acquire Cyan for $335 Million

Ciena agreed to acquire Cyan for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $400 million (or approximately $335 million net of cash).

Cyan, which is based in Petaluma, California, supplies its carrier-grade BluePlanet SDN/NFV software and Z-series packet-optical platform to carriers and large enterprises. Cyan’s Blue Planet provides service orchestration, automation, SDN control, and multi-vendor management capabilities. The company claims over 150 deployments by network operators since its introduction in November 2012. The Z-series is a scalable, COTS-based P-OTP family that converges Carrier Ethernet 2.0, DWDM, ROADM, OTN and SONET/SDH for metro and regional networks. It new N-Series Open Hyperscale Transport Platform (OHTP) is designed for large numbers of 100G connections between data centers over campus or metro regional distances.

Cyan was founded in 2006 and has approximately 260 employees worldwide. FY 2014 revenue amounted to $101 million.

Ciena said the acquisition bring orchestration and control software that is vendor-agnostic and best-in-class. Ciena is looking to build an expanded ecosystem of VNF partners. Cyan’s metro packet/optical hardware business offers a complementary base of key customers.

“Ciena is transforming networks by applying web-scale technologies for delivering greater efficiency, network automation and agility while driving the industry toward an open ecosystem,” said Gary Smith, president and CEO of Ciena. “The addition of Cyan accelerates the availability of a complete solution for our customers to deliver virtualized networks and services on-demand.”

“Since launching the first Z-Series packet-optical products in 2009, Cyan has introduced the world’s first integrated packet-optical platform, the world’s first deployment ready multi-vendor SDN controller and NFV orchestrator, and the world’s first disaggregated “bright box” optical system. Innovation is core to our business, and our innovation has always been focused on helping customers transform their networks. Joining forces with Ciena, another clear innovator in the networking space, will accelerate this transformation,” stated Mark Floyd, chairman and chief executive officer, Cyan.

Cyan also reported that revenue for the first quarter of 2015 grew to $36.0 million, up 89 percent when compared with $19.0 million in the first quarter of 2014 and up 18 percent when compared with $30.5 million for the fourth quarter of 2014. GAAP net loss for the first quarter was $52.9 million, or $1.11 per share, compared to a net loss of $17.8 million, or $0.38 per share, in the same period last year and a net loss of $15.0 million, or $0.32 per share, in the fourth quarter of 2014.

http://www.cyaninc.com/company/news-room/press-releases/2015/cyan-announces-pending-acquisition-by-ciena-releases-first-quarter-2015-financial-results-#.VUeEWfn484l

http://www.ciena.com/about/newsroom/press-releases/Ciena-Announces-Intent-to-Acquire-Cyan.html

• 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.

• 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.
• In October 2014, Cyan significantly extended the reach of its Blue Planet SDN platform by adding the ability to provision and manage Ethernet services across Cisco ASR a nd Juniper MX routers.

  Blue Planet SDN-based control over Cisco and Juniper equipment is based on access to standards-based interfaces such as CLI and NETCONF/YANG.  New element adapters being introduced this quarter use Link-Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) to auto-discover Cisco network, including allnodes, connections, andthe overall physical layer topology.  Platforms supported include the Cisco ASR 901, ASR 903, ASR 9000 and ME 3600 platforms, as well as the Juniper MX960, MX480, and MX2010 platforms. Blue Planet functionality allows customers to automate, manage, inventory, and provision Ethernet services across networks built with these devices.