Cyan Powers Colt’s Ethernet Upgrade, Gains More SDN Allies

Colt is launching its next-generation Carrier Ethernet platform, with a focus on automating service delivery and scale. Colt operates one of the few pan-European footprints with substantial metro depth. They have some 19,000 on-net buildings across 39 major cities in 22 countries. And in order to keep all that making sense as network complexity skyrockets, they’re using Cyan’s gear and multi-vendor SDN software with NFV and other enhancements in the pipeline.  I’ve speculated in the past that Colt looked like a likely consolidation target at some point, but lately I’ve been wondering if they aren’t just weathering the economic storm while putting all the right pieces in place for what is to come.

The multivendor piece of that is one of Cyan’s key SDN focuses right now, and on that front they added several high profile names to their ecosystem. Metaswitch, Red Hat, Connectem, and Mellanox Technologies have joined Blue Orbit, and together at the Layer 123 SDN and OpenFlow World Congress they are demonstrating several new use cases: orchestrating WAN resources between data centers and three virtual network functions from a single centralized controller.  Just about every vendor is working on SDN from one angle or another, but Cyan seems have one of the most active team efforts.