Anything in network automation is hot these days, so it’s no surprise that the Ciena announcement it was buying DonRiver has made news. Light Reading has a nice story on it. Unlike some other network-vendor M&A that seems to create an independent product area hanging in space, Ciena’s deal seems to target a specific ecosystemic combination of the new DonRiver entity and its current Blue Planet stuff.
This deal, I hear, was promoted by some Ciena and Blue Planet users, operators who also employed DonRiver and liked what it brought to their overall operations platform integration game. Like most “orchestration” tools, Blue Planet has tended to target basic service deployment and some lightweight lifecycle management extensions, but it never had any real OSS/BSS integration and so didn’t target the service as much as service components. DonRiver could change that.
DonRiver has been around a while, mostly operating as a customization and integration specialist for OSS/BSS systems. Over time, they’ve developed some tools that supplement their custom work, and these form the basis for the products they offer. Like many smaller tech firms (and even some larger ones!) they’re highly geeky, which means that you have to dig to gain an understanding of just what they’re doing, certainly dig beyond the news.
Here’s how the Ciena release describes it: “DonRiver will bring new capabilities to Ciena’s Blue Planet software and services portfolio that significantly enhance the company’s ability to deliver on its Adaptive Network vision through intelligent, closed-loop automation.” That’s a great goal, of course, but so far there’s not much detail on how it will be achieved. The Ciena release specifically mentions the DonRiver’s “federated network and service inventory management solutions”, and on the DonRiver website, this seems to target multiple-OSS integration. It’s almost surely intended to be more than that for Ciena.
The first hint we have from the press release is: “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. “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.”
The basic vision of DonRiver is that “OSS” is almost a virtual term rather than a single specific product. It represents the stack of relationships that starts with the customer, moves through the “service” or business-level descriptions of what’s being sold, and down to the service, network, and element management systems and their associated devices. In simple terms, “OSS” here means the overall framework for operations management at every level, and so the integration or federation that the release talks about is likely to refer to everything in the network, threading through all the current management/operations processes.
The DonRiver OSS Product Suite is a group of tools/elements built around the DonRiver Fusion integration framework/fabric. It presents a Network Planning unified view of everything, and also includes a Rapid Path Search capability for finding the best path for a service/connection, Network Discovery and Synchronization to collect every piece of configuration data and centralize it in an inventory database, Automated Workflow Management to create orchestrable, automatic, process integration, and the OSS Network Analyzer that provides reports on important “OSS” trends.
The arguable heart of the suite is the Network Discovery and Synchronization element. It’s set up much like many of the generalized network elements we find for the cloud (Neutron, OpenDaylight) in that it has plugins to support various management interfaces and protocols. These are used to pull in current management/configuration data from everything (which is why I put “OSS” in quotes here; it’s more than that), and the results are correlated and made available from a repository. From there, it can be conveyed in various ways an interconnected to various external systems.
Automated Workflow is also very important, and probably the focus of the specific integration with Blue Planet. Right now, as I’ve already noted, Blue Planet is a very low-level tool, something only a bit higher than an open-source NFV MANO implementation. What Automated Workflow would add is the generalized service-order-driven lifecycle automation that operators are looking to get. You need the rest of the stuff to do this right, but for Ciena the functional improvements DonRiver brings to the table would likely be connected to this piece first.
DonRiver’s stuff, overall, could bring a lot of the ingredients of a true zero-touch automation solution to Ciena. In fact, the combination of Blue Planet and DonRiver could be very near to a complete solution, but that doesn’t mean that Ciena is going to reap boundless benefits from the deal. Ciena under-leveraged Blue Planet considerably, for two key reasons that will apply as much or more to the DonRiver assets.
Reason one is that optics is on the bottom and service lifecycle automation is way up top. There’s no natural connection, no natural symbiosis, and not all that many leverageable contacts common to both. Ciena doesn’t call on CIOs who run OSS/BSS. Yes, DonRiver has their own assets in the area, but most of these M&A deals stand or fall on how well the acquiring company can manage its new assets. Ciena hasn’t set the world on fire above the optical layer.
Reason number two is that in the end, all the DonRiver assets leverage considerable professional services skills, skills to support the kind of across-the-board integration of management and operations that many operators are not yet prepared for. Those that are, those that have faced the problems of lifecycle automation and understand the issues and needs, will find the Ciena toolbox well-stocked, but for the rest it will be a challenge to get projects moving. Particularly, I must add, when the scope of an integrated strategy admits perhaps to too many possible project sponsors. Who is your buyer?
I know a lot about DonRiver from some of my friends in the network operator space, and they’re uniformly impressed by DonRiver’s people, particularly their knowledge of the ins and outs of operations/management integration. Can these people, the feet-on-the-street professionals that have made things at the top of the pyramid work so far, somehow reach out and guide the senior management of a firm whose own products are in the basement? That’s exactly what has to happen, and only Ciena can make sure it does.