DUSSELDORF, Germany -- Ciena (NYSE: CIEN) unveiled key enhancements to its Blue Planet network orchestration software designed to help operators expand and accelerate the delivery of new services across both virtual and physical domains. Available today, the enhancements enable service providers to accelerate their transformation from closed and siloed network architectures to more open, on-demand software-driven networks.

Key Facts:

Ciena’s Blue Planet division is leading the industry into a new era of truly open, software-defined, multi-vendor networks. Blue Planet software helps service providers automate services – from creation to orchestration to delivery – across both physical and virtual domains. This reduces operational costs, eliminates network complexity and drives greater competitive advantage through a level of service programmability previously unachievable.

Blue Planet software advances Ciena’s OPn® network architecture approach and delivers a number of critical benefits to service providers, which include:

Executive Comments:

“Ciena’s Blue Planet division is delivering innovation in the network virtualization and service orchestration space. Their movement toward micro-services architectures and containers is in tune with leading network operators, who expect that these compelling technologies will help them to transform, virtualize, and differentiate.”
- Michael Howard, Senior Research Director, IHS-Infonetics

“More than a year ago, Ciena’s Blue Planet division (formerly Cyan), embarked on a journey to break down the software silos that are prevalent in the vendor community. Now, we’re poised to bring together SDN, NFV and service orchestration into a unified, open platform that enables service providers to leverage these cutting-edge technologies for building virtualized on-demand networks and cloud-based service offerings.”
- Mike Hatfield, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Blue Planet, Ciena

“We are beginning to see what innovation is truly possible with Blue Planet. One thing is clear – Blue Planet is disruptive and serves as an agent for transforming the network as we have known it. We look forward to continuing to work with our customers and driving new virtualized on-demand services into the marketplace.”
- Francois Locoh-Donou, Senior Vice President, Global Products Group, Ciena

Ciena Corp. (NYSE: CIEN)