Colt a Significant Win for Cyan

European network operator Colt is building its Carrier Ethernet Multi-Service Platform (MSP) network on Cyan's Z-series packet-optical transport systems and its Blue Planet software, the two companies announced today. Colt becomes Cyan's largest announced customer outside the US in a significant endorsement of its approach to automating multi-vendor networks. (See Colt Taps Cyan for SDN-Ready Ethernet Platform .)

Colt Technology Services Group Ltd wanted a way to automate, provision, and manage Ethernet transport and Carrier Ethernet services over a network that uses best-of-breed technology at each layer. Cyan Inc. is providing a means of managing that multi-service, multi-vendor network, including gear from Accedian Networks, among other vendors.

"They wanted to build more orchestration and more automation into their multi-service network," says Joe Cumello, CMO of Cyan. "We were able to give them a solution that is more modular and more automated, with reduced provisioning times using one software orchestration layer, Blue Planet." That software orchestration gives Colt a single end-to-end view of its multi-vendor, multi-service network.

Why this matters
Colt is aggressively upgrading its network for future bandwidth and service demands and, in the process, beginning a transition to software-defined networking (SDN). While this is not an SDN deployment, Colt's approach does adopt major SDN concepts, including multi-vendor orchestration from a single SDN controller. But it also solves Colt's real-world issues today of needing more rapid turn-up of bandwidth over a multi-vendor network and gives the company highly competitive service provisioning times.

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— Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading