CIENA Q&A
THE VIEWFROMCIENA CLOSING THE LOOP WITH CENTINA
Back in November 2019, Ciena entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Centina, a provider of service assurance analytics and network performance management solutions. The aim was to expand Blue Planet’s assurance capabilities by collecting and collating fault, event, and performance data from multiple vendors and network layers using Blue Planet Multi-Domain Service Orchestration (MDSO) and Blue Planet Inventory (BPI). It’s still early days, but Peter Dykes asked Kailem Anderson, vice president of portfolio and engineering, at Ciena’s Blue Planet division, how things were progressing.
By continuing to evolve the Blue Planet portfolio, we deliver compelling automation solutions that help our customers address
systems (OSS), focused on closed-loop automation.
What market forces/technology developments led to Blue Planet’s decision to acquire Centina? In today’s highly competitive market, it’s more important than ever for CSPs to improve the customer experience. Blue
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What does Centina have that Blue Planet doesn’t and how will the acquisition extend the company’s portfolio? Centina adds a crucial set of capabilities that allow Blue Planet to fully execute on our closed-loop automation vision. With the addition
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their challenges, transform their networks and modernise operations. This acquisition allows us to continue solving the complex challenges service providers face as more digital services start to be rolled out. In addition, there are new opportunities which have been opened up to us within CSP operations, which previously would not have been a target.
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Planet supports service providers on this journey by providing closed-loop, intelligent automation solutions that help CSPs optimise key business processes to increase profitability. With Centina, we can address customers’ needs to reduce costs associated with operating the network – which is generally more than 50% of total OPEX – via more efficient troubleshooting, and improved SLA management. By continuously monitoring the performance of revenue-generating services across multiple network layers, Centina’s service assurance solution helps providers resolve issues more quickly, optimise network performance, and ultimately deliver a differentiated customer experience.
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of Centina’s multi-domain, multi-layer service assurance solution, Blue Planet now collects and collates the fault, event and performance data that’s necessary to trigger automated self-healing and self- optimisation. With Centina’s assurance solution, we help our customers resolve issues more quickly and optimise network performance. 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. Centina is also highly differentiated as a standalone service assurance solution. Features and capabilities such as the ability to support virtual and hybrid networks, a wide variety of multi-vendor plug-ins, graph-based analytics, and on-demand reporting will also help further differentiate Blue Planet from our competition.
When will the Centina product line be integrated into Blue Planet?
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Integration planning is well underway; we will release a comprehensive combined roadmap for customers in fiscal 2020. Will Centina be fully integrated into Ciena or run as a wholly-owned subsidiary? Centina’s vSure service assurance solution will be combined into Ciena’s existing Blue Planet portfolio and will form a new family known as
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How will this market develop going forward?
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Today, there are no clear leaders in the rapidly growing market for network automation software. With the addition of Centina, we
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the Blue Planet Unified Assurance and Analytics (UAA). As such, Centina will not run as a subsidiary..
How will the acquisition impact on the company’s future roadmap?
will strengthen Blue Planet’s position as an emerging leader in operational support
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| ISSUE 20 | Q1 2020
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