Ciena has inked a definitive agreement to buy service assurance analytics vendor Centina in order to add it into Ciena's Blue Planet division.
The deal is slated to close by the end of calendar 2019 once it clears the customary closing and regulatory hurdles. Financial terms of the deal weren't announced.
Privately-held Centina will bring its service assurance capabilities into the Blue Planet fold to help service providers modernize and leverage information from their operations support systems (OSS.) OSS has become a key area for service providers as they virtualize their networks and services in hybrid models.
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Blue Planet's software strategy of providing closed-loop automation improves service providers' agility while also helping them offer a better customer experience. In February, Ciena followed through on its previously announced plan to split out its Blue Planet software stack as a more independent division.
Blue Planet, which Ciena bought in 2015, became a standalone division at Ciena in order to focus on "intelligent automation." Blue Planet's software and network architecture include software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV).
Centina, which was founded in 2006, will expand Blue Planet’s assurance capabilities by collecting and collating fault, event, and performance data from multiple vendors and network layers, including virtual domains such as NFV as well as more traditional optical, Ethernet and IP/MPLS networks and services.
Integrating Centina’s service assurance capabilities with Blue Planet Multi-Domain Service Orchestration (MDSO) and Blue Planet Inventory (BPI) will enable continuous optimization of service performance, quality and availability on a proactive basis by resolving problems before they impact the service and user experience.
“The acquisition of Centina advances Blue Planet’s position as an emerging leader in operational support systems (OSS), focused on closed-loop automation. By continuously monitoring the performance of services, Centina’s multi-layer, multi-domain service assurance solution will help our customers resolve issues more quickly and optimize network performance,” said Rick Hamilton, senior vice president of Blue Planet, in a statement. “This is a key step to achieving more adaptive networks that are critical in today’s digital society where the customer experience is the ultimate differentiator.”