Cyan brings software defined networks to the telco market

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Cyan, a company that has a history making optical packet networking gear as well as software to manage its own boxes and that of other network equipment companies, has hopped on the software-defined networking bandwagon with its Blue Planet controller.

Cyan, a company formed in 2006 to build optical networking gear for telecommunications providers has had a pretty good run selling boxes to middle mile transit providers that helped Internet traffic bypass routers in the core networks as well as software that helped manage the core network. But after seeing the trend toward software defined networks, the company tweaked its business to focus on software…

The result is Blue Planet, controller software that has the ability to work with any vendor’s switches and underlying gear as well as APIs that let gear and applications sitting above the Cyan controller software talk to networking hardware. The product is akin to the controller software that Big Switch and Nicira sell. Big Switch just raised a $25 million Series B round of funding, while this summer Nicira was bought by VMware in a deal valued at $1.26 billion…

Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/cloud/cyan-brings-software-defined-networks-to-the-telco-market/