Closing the Loop: Ciena closes acquisition of Centina

Today marks an exciting day in the ongoing evolution of Blue Planet, as we have officially closed the acquisition of Centina, a leading provider of service assurance analytics and network performance management solutions.

I’d like to welcome the Centina team into our Blue Planet family. Centina brings with it a wealth of OSS and assurance experts, enhancing our ability to deliver the critical features service providers are demanding.

With the addition of multi-domain, multi-layer service assurance to the portfolio, Blue Planet now collects and collates the fault, event, and performance data that’s necessary to trigger automated self-healing and self-optimization, effectively closing the loop to improve the user experience and overall operational efficiency for our customers.- Kailem Anderson, VP of Portfolio and Engineering, Blue Planet

The past 18 months have been a transformative period for Blue Planet, marked by three key acquisitions. These major moves were guided by our vision to expand Blue Planet from its origins as the industry’s defining multi-domain service orchestrator, to a more complete software portfolio focused on closed-loop automation to help accelerate our customers’ journey to more adaptive, self-healing and self-optimizing networks. Each acquisition added key capabilities to meet this important goal:

• Packet Design added sophisticated layer 3 performance management and optimization capabilities to better understand the real-time state and performance of multi-vendor IP/MPLS networks. The former Packet Design products became the highly successful Blue Planet Route Optimization and Analysis (ROA) family.


• DonRiver added open and flexible operations software that federates data from multiple existing inventory systems to deliver a unified, end-to-end visualization of network and service resources, and provide a strong foundation for accelerated OSS rationalization and automation. DonRiver’s groundbreaking solution is now known as Blue Planet Inventory (BPI).


• The acquisition of Centina adds a crucial set of capabilities that allow Blue Planet to fully execute on the closed-loop automation vision. With the addition of multi-domain, multi-layer service assurance to the portfolio, Blue Planet now collects and collates the fault, event, and performance data that’s necessary to trigger automated self-healing and self-optimization, effectively closing the loop to improve the user experience and overall operational efficiency for our customers.

The work of integrating Centina’s software within Blue Planet has already begun. The former vSure service assurance solution will be combined with our existing Blue Planet Analytics (BPA) software and related assets to form a new family known as Blue Planet Unified Assurance and Analytics (UAA). We’ll be sharing more details on UAA in the coming weeks.

With Unified Assurance and Analytics integrated in the portfolio, Blue Planet’s focus on closed-loop automation is unique and unmatched in the operational support systems (OSS) market, rounding out a comprehensive software portfolio that delivers multi-domain orchestration, federated inventory, route optimization, and analytics capabilities to support the broadest range of closed-loop automation use cases across multi-layer, multi-vendor networks.

Most importantly, it will help us continue to deliver compelling intelligent automation solutions that help our customers address their business challenges, transform their networks, and modernize their operations.