Nokia's acquisition of network analytics specialist Deepfield will give the vendor giant a new weapon in its tech armory that can be targeted beyond telecom and cable operator network markets, according to a senior executive at the Finnish firm. (See Nokia Adds Analytics Smarts to Its SDN Tech With Deepfield Acquisition.)

Steve Vogelsang, Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK)'s CTO of IP and Optical Networks, says Deepfield's reputation amongst service providers was very positive, particularly in relation to gaining visibility of third-party applications and services (such as OTT video), prompting the Nokia team to reach out for discussions about how the startup's technology worked and how they could work together. "We saw a great opportunity to take Deepfield to a much larger market. We didn't do any joint development but we were so impressed that we decided [to acquire the company]. We're very excited about what Deepfield has done," Vogelsang tells Light Reading.

Importantly, the analytics system developed by Deepfield is not just applicable to Nokia's traditional market -- communications network operators. "The use cases go beyond just the CSP market. The hyper-visibility that Deepfield's tech provides is also important to content providers as they make decisions about how they peer, where they place their caches and so on. They have largely been blind in making such decisions up to now," believes the Nokia man, who also notes how Deepfield's technology can also be used in DDoS attack detection and threat mitigation.

Such business opportunities are important: The ability to address adjacent and alternative markets is becoming increasingly important for all vendors as the market transforms quicker than most can react. (See Telecoms Sideswiped by the Digital Market Transition.)

But of course there are still plenty of fixed, mobile and cable network operators to sell to and most will be in need of groundbreaking network and service analytics capabilities and that's an opportunity that both Nokia and Deepfield are looking to tap. "As a startup we wanted to get global reach… Currently we have a significant presence in North America -- we entered Europe about ten to 12 months ago and expect major customer announcements as the sales process progresses but we want it deployed globally," and that's where a large company such as Nokia can help, notes Deepfield CEO Craig Labovitz.

But Nokia isn't the only company with global reach, of course, so did he talk to other suitors about an acquisition? Labovitz says he can't talk about any other discussions or Deepfield's financials.

So what's next? The acquisition is set to close during the first quarter of 2017, after which there will be a focus on expanding market potential and combining Deepfield's capabilities with Nokia's SDN controller technology. "We will integrate Deepfield with our SDN solutions -- the NSP [Network Services Platform], our carrier SDN platform, and Nuage's VSP [Virtualized Services Platform] platform to close the loop and provide automated control of carrier and data center networks. Since Deepfield is an open platform, it provides open APIs for integration, which can be integrated with any SDN solution, not just ours. In fact some of their current customers have already done integration into their own network automation solutions," notes Vogelsang.

— Ray Le Maistre, , Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading