Packet Design has joined Ciena’s Blue Orbit program to accelerate the delivery of multi-layer SDN management and orchestration capabilities.
The two companies will work together to integrate Packet Design’s IP/MPLS analytics and WAN-SDN management and orchestration (MANO) platform with Ciena’s Blue Planet Software, which enables multi-domain orchestration and provisioning. Network operator customers of both companies have been requesting this to achieve the multi-layer visibility and control needed to realize SDN benefits.
“SDN MANO is not viable without real-time telemetry and analytics at scale, because IP/MPLS and optical networks are complex and constantly changing,” said Scott Sherwood, CEO of Packet Design. “By partnering with Ciena we can address the clear and growing need in the industry for multi-layer MANO as well as a platform on which network operator and third-party SDN applications may be developed.”
Today, the network’s optical and IP/MPLS layers are managed separately. This limits agility and can result in less-than-optimal use of multi-layer capacity. Using SDN technology to converge the management and orchestration of both layers provides a flexible pool of resources that can automatically and intelligently respond to changing network conditions and business demands. This will enable network operators to be more agile and deliver a greater return on network assets.
“The combination of Packet Design’s analytics and SDN MANO capabilities with Blue Planet’s multi-domain orchestration provides the holistic, real-time visibility and provisioning capabilities network operators are demanding,” said Jim Brinksma, VP of Strategy and Business Development at Ciena’s Blue Planet Division.
As part of the partnership, Packet Design joins Ciena’s Blue Orbit Partner Ecosystem. Blue Orbit is a group of like-minded organizations committed to supporting network operators’ ongoing transformation to open, programmable, and virtualized networks.
The Latest
According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...
2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...
Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...
An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...
Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...
In March, New Relic published the State of Observability for Media and Entertainment Report to share insights, data, and analysis into the adoption and business value of observability across the media and entertainment industry. Here are six key takeaways from the report ...
Regardless of their scale, business decisions often take time, effort, and a lot of back-and-forth discussion to reach any sort of actionable conclusion ... Any means of streamlining this process and getting from complex problems to optimal solutions more efficiently and reliably is key. How can organizations optimize their decision-making to save time and reduce excess effort from those involved? ...
As enterprises accelerate their cloud adoption strategies, CIOs are routinely exceeding their cloud budgets — a concern that's about to face additional pressure from an unexpected direction: uncertainty over semiconductor tariffs. The CIO Cloud Trends Survey & Report from Azul reveals the extent continued cloud investment despite cost overruns, and how organizations are attempting to bring spending under control ...
According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...
Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...