CHICAGO -- Light Reading's Big Telecom Event -- Cyan on Tuesday introduced Planet Orchestrate, software designed to allow service providers to manage both physical and virtual network resources.

The software is designed to combine the WAN automation and management for multi-vendor physical network resources that's in Cyan Inc. 's Blue Planet software with virtual resources such as cloud services and virtual network functions.

Planet Orchestrate is designed to cut opex costs and complexity. But it does more than that, Cyan CMO Joe Cumello says. "We're creating an environment for services providers to break out of the commoditization cycle they're in." Services such as Ethernet, optical, and IP are highly commoditized.

"The pricing of the services keep going down," says Cumello. "We're providing operators with the ability to not just manage those Ethernet circuits or optical circuits in a multi-vendor situation, but to add virtual services on top of that to create new revenue streams. We're allowing them to change the network service to something greater than it was before so they can charge more for it."

For SDN management, Planet Orchestrate supports OpenDaylight and other SDN controllers. For cloud management, Planet Orchestrate supports the OpenStack cloud stack now, with support for VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) in process. And Planet Orchestrate also supports the emerging Network Functions Virtualization standards from ETSI.

The orchestration technology can help service providers allow enterprise customers to provision network resources on the fly, for example, spinning up and down virtual machines or temporarily increasing bandwidth. "This moves service providers up the value chain from being dumb pipes to being able to sell value added services," says Recep Ozdag, Cyan's director of solutions marketing for SDN and NFV. "As service providers are converting points of presence and service offices to data centers, they can manage and orchestrate those data centers from a single pane of glass."

Using Planet Orchestrate, carriers can deploy services either in centralized data centers for ease of management, or at or near the customer premises for performance, Cyan says.

Planet Orchestrate is available now for proofs-of-concept and trial deployment. Commercial availability for NFV orchestration and multi-domain will be in August, and cloud service orchestration will be commercially available in the fourth quarter. Pricing will be based on the number of nodes and virtual functions being orchestrated.

Cyan's message of increasing service provider agility is similar to that of other vendors touting network virtualization.

For example, Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) made a big deal out of combining virtual and physical network management at its Cisco Live conference last month. Cisco's virtualization technology is closely tied with its Nexus switching hardware. (See Cisco Integrates Virtual, Physical Networks.)

And Overture recently introduced hardware designed to combine the benefits of virtualized functions with dedicated hardware at customer premises. (See Overture Adds Hardware to Its NFV Pitch and Overture Trials NFV Software With Hidden Punch.)

Cyan touts multi-vendor support as its differentiator, which positioning makes it similar to -- and possibly in competition with -- Brocade. (See Brocade Unveils Open Carrier Platform for SDN, NFV -- and we've got an article on Brocade's virtualization strategy in the pipeline.)

Whether Cyan succeeds against the competition will depend on execution.

Cyan also says it's adding two new partners to its Blue Orbit ecosystem. Fortinet Inc. and Certes technology can now be managed by Blue Planet.

— Mitch Wagner, , West Coast Bureau Chief, Light Reading. Got a tip about SDN or NFV? Send it to [email protected].

Want to learn more about SDN and the transport network? Check out the agenda for Light Reading's Big Telecom Event (BTE), June 17 and 18 at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers. The event combines the educational power of interactive conference sessions devised and hosted by Heavy Reading's experienced industry analysts with multi-vendor interoperability and proof-of-concept networking and application showcases. For more on the event, the topics, and the stellar service provider speaker lineup, see Telecommunication Luminaries to Discuss the Hottest Industry Trends at Light Reading's Big Telecom Event in June.