Ciena To Buy Centina To ‘Accelerate’ Intelligent Automation Strategy

'This is a key step to achieving more adaptive networks that are critical in today’s digital society where the customer experience is the ultimate differentiator,' says Rick Hamilton, senior vice president of Blue Planet, a division of Ciena.

Networking specialist Ciena unveiled plans Thursday to acquire network performance and analytics vendor Centina Systems in a move to boost the company’s software strategy around intelligent automation.

Centina’s technology and engineering teams will be integrated into Blue Planet, a division of Ciena that focuses on software automation.

“The acquisition of Centina advances Blue Planet’s position as an emerging leader in operational support systems focused on closed-loop automation,” said Rick Hamilton, senior vice president of Blue Planet, in a statement. “This is a key step to achieving more adaptive networks that are critical in today’s digital society where the customer experience is the ultimate differentiator.”

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Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Ciena, which received a 5-star rating in CRN’s 2019 Partner Program Guide, said it expects to close the acquisition by the end of 2019.

Hamilton said that by continuously monitoring the performance of services, Centina’s multi-domain service assurance solution will help Ciena customers resolve issues more quickly and optimize network performance.

Founded in 2006, Plano, Texas-based Centina provides service assurance analytics and network performance management offerings.

Hanover, Md.-based Ciena plans to integrate Centina’s service assurance capabilities with Blue Planet Multi-Domain Service Orchestration and Blue Planet Inventory to allow continuous optimization of service performance, quality and availability on a proactive basis by resolving problems automatically before they impact the service and user experience, according to the company.

Ciena said the acquisition will “accelerate” Blue Planet’s software strategy, which provides automation offerings focused on helping communication service providers improve operational agility while delivering a differentiated customer experience. Centina will expand Blue Planet’s assurance capabilities by collecting and collating fault, event and performance data from multiple vendors and network layers—including virtual domains such as network functions virtualization (NFV).

This is not Ciena’s first acquisition to boost Blue Planet’s intelligent automation strategy. In September 2018, the company acquired service provider software specialist DonRiver to expand its autonomous networking strategy driven by analytics and automation.