Ciena strengthens its software suite with DonRiver acquisition

Optical and IP transport company Ciena acquired software and service company DonRiver to shore up its Blue Planet portfolio.

One week after its CEO explicitly said it was on the lookout for new software M&A, Ciena announced that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire DonRiver, a privately-owned software and service company specialised in federated network and service inventory management solution.

Ciena reported a strong quarter, but its software business suffered a 3% year-on-year dip. Although the SDN-based network management suit Blue Planet only accounted for a minor share of the total software sales, high hopes have been banked on it. When talking to analysts at the quarterly result call Ciena’s CEO Gary Smith said, “With Blue Planet, we’ve done a lot of learning over the last two to three years, …the bookings were very encouraging. And we should be able to come into the year — next year with a backlog for 2019.”

Similar to Ciena’s recent acquisition of Packet Design, DonRiver has been a partner to Ciena, so its technology knowhow is well known to the latter. Despite that it has a couple of A-list clients including Telstra, Comcast, and Rogers, it is not DonRiver’s clients or the revenues that was driving the acquisition, Ciena told Telecoms.com.

“The combination of Blue Planet and DonRiver will enhance our ability to deliver closed loop automation of network services and the underlying operational processes across IT/operations and the network,” said Rick Hamilton, senior vice president of Global Software and Services at Ciena about the latest acquisition. “With this new set of technology and expertise, we can help customers realize the full benefits of network automation by helping them move away from highly complex and fragmented OSS environments to those that accurately reflect the real-time state and utilization of network resources.”

Specifically, what DonRiver could bring to the Blue Planet portfolio, especially the Analytics & Intelligence component, is its capability to bring a holistic view of the network inventory. With networks getting more complex, stacks of OSS are being added to the architecture, making it increasing difficult for the operators to know what exactly is happening in the layers of networks. The vastly improved visibility and accuracy enabled by DonRiver’s expertise will strengthen Ciena’s value proposition to help operators optimise the OSS environments. As Ciena executives said to Telecoms.com, DonRiver’s engineers can do much more than network inventory, they are OSS experts.

The terms of the acquisition were not made public.