| From: FJB | 2/19/2015 7:28:25 AM | | | | | | Moving on to our progress with our Blue Planet SDN and NFV software platform, on our last call we reported that we tracking 15 Blue Planet active evaluations and that we expected to start seeing significant decisions in 2015. Today I'm very pleased to announce we have been awarded two RFP wins for NFV orchestration. One of these wins is with a tier one carrier. To our knowledge, these are the first NFV orchestration RFPs by carriers to be awarded to-date.
seekingalpha.com
In both cases, Blue Planet was chosen over offerings from much larger competitors. Blue Planet was selected for its ability to orchestrate virtual network functions and services from end to end. In addition, Blue Planet’s ability to orchestrate virtual functions from multiple vendors meets a key customer requirement, and has proven to be a significant competitive advantage. |
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| To: FJB who wrote (33) | 2/19/2015 7:33:33 AM | | From: FJB | | | | Yes, there were only two analysts on the call.
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Based on this our current view is that our 2015 revenue will grow in the range of 35% to 45% over 2014.
...We expect our operating cash flow usage in the first quarter to be in the mid-single digit range.
...A lot of people have Vaporware right now. We go in, we go into the lab, we demonstrate that we have a real product that is deployable and commercializable. So that’s been a significant factor in our winning. The second piece is that we’ve demonstrated that we’re multi-vendor. Some of our competitors say that they are, but really are just a life support system for their own products. So those have been two significant factors in our wins.
...the announcement of our new N-Series which we think will have a revenue contribution late in this year
...we are modeling breakeven kind of second quarter of 2016.
... |
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| From: FJB | 2/19/2015 3:14:24 PM | | | | | | | Sold most of my position this morning. They have five quarters until possible breakeven and their N-series/DCI product won't ship until the end of the year. |
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| From: FJB | 3/12/2015 11:25:04 AM | | | | | | CenturyLink to Offer NFV-Enhanced Services to Enterprise and SMB Customers with Cyan’s Blue Planet
PETALUMA, Calif. & MONROE, La.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
Cyan ( CYNI) and CenturyLink, Inc. ( CTL) today announced that CenturyLink will leverage Cyan’s Blue Planet NFV Orchestrator to deliver NFV-enhanced services to enterprise and small and midsized business (SMB) customers.
Cyan, a leading provider of SDN, NFV, and packet-optical solutions for network operators, will provide CenturyLink orchestration for their Programmable Services Backbone (PSB). CenturyLink’s PSB will provide a platform that enables the delivery of next-generation virtualized services to its customers. This software-based functionality will allow CenturyLink to quickly scale services to address changing business demands while reducing the time to deploy new networking services in market.
Specifically, CenturyLink will use Cyan’s Blue Planet NFV Orchestrator to bridge multiple technologies to instantiate virtual network functions (VNF) from multiple vendors. Blue Planet will add these virtual network functions to CenturyLink’s network for quickly providing software-enabled services and ubiquitous service coverage to CenturyLink’s broad set of customers.
“CenturyLink has taken a leadership position in driving the changes required to build a more service- centric network that derives maximum value from network assets while addressing evolving customer requirements,” said Aamir Hussain, CTO, CenturyLink. “The Programmable Services Backbone delivers an open, software-enabled architecture based on Cyan’s NFV orchestration technology that will allow us to rapidly deploy new services to enterprise and SMB customers across our footprint.”
“CenturyLink is leading the network transformation movement that is so critical to the future of our industry,” said Mike Hatfield, president, Cyan. “We’re proud that Cyan’s Blue Planet is playing a critical role in how they deploy multi-vendor VNFs as services to end customers. Together, CenturyLink and Cyan are unifying the data center, virtual resources, WAN, and managed services to create a new way of doing business for network operators.”
Blue Planet supports multi-vendor NFV Orchestration capabilities. The software can instantiate and control virtual functions, coordinate with physical and virtual network resources, and interconnect virtual functions (e.g., vFirewall, vEncryption, vDPI, vRouter, vDNS, etc.) to achieve service chaining. The programmability of the Blue Planet NFV Orchestrator allows carriers like CenturyLink to onboard and define new services through a flexible template-based architecture. The open architecture of Blue Planet’s NFV Orchestrator enables rich, multi-vendor environments within the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI), including support for different cloud management software and physical servers. |
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| To: FJB who wrote (38) | 3/12/2015 11:28:04 AM | | From: FJB | | | | Telefonica, Cyan, and Partners Take an Important Step Forward for NFV at MWC 2015
By: Recep Ozdag
 In a recent blog I wrote about why OpenStack in and of itself is not a service orchestrator but a cloud management system (CMS) that abstracts out the complexity of a heterogeneous data center making it easier for administrators to run applications on fairly large scale compute resources. OpenStack and other CMSs such as VMware and CloudStack fall into the virtualized infrastructure manager (VIM) category of the ETSI Network Function Virtualization (NFV) framework. This framework is one of the methods for providing structure around a multi-component and multi-vendor approach to bringing modern day IT solutions to the carrier world.
However, OpenStack and other traditional CMSs lack Enhanced Platform Awareness (EPA), therefore, they can blindly deploy virtual machines and virtual network functions (VNFs) with regardless of the performance requirements or hardware capabilities of the server resulting in:
Inefficient use of compute resources
Not being able to achieve the carrier grade performance requirements
Carrier grade NFV, and the services that are deployed based on it, requires adherence to strict SLAs to ensure high-performance and availability. Why? Because NFV-enabled or enhanced services must provide better performance than the previous mode of operation to ensure adoption. The trick is that in order for VNFs to deliver on these carrier grade requirements they need to be properly deployed in the underlying infrastructure to leverage the latest hardware features such as hardware acceleration.
NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) and the associated information models, describing both the infrastructure and VNF requirements, are key to achieving this goal effectively and in a cost efficient manner for the service provider. Together, in cooperation, the NFV orchestrator and the CMS work together to ensure high-performance, massively scalable NFV deployments.
To prove this use case, Telefonica, Cyan, and Red Hat worked on a concept called “Deterministic NFV”, which was announced back in May 2014. The goal: to develop an architecture that allows the deterministic placement of VNFs using an intelligent NFV orchestrator that can digest standard information models describing the underlying hardware infrastructure and VNF capabilities to deliver carrier grade services. The resulting Enhanced Platform Awareness capability allows Cyan’s Blue Planet NFV orchestration platform to intelligently deploy VNF workloads onto the underlying infrastructure, enabling the optimal performance and SLAs. This also unleashes the favourable total cost of ownership that NFV promises due to this more efficient use of the underlying infrastructure.
These infrastructure capabilities include features such as open source software libraries like DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit), VMDq, SR-IOV, PCIe pass through, NUMA awareness, CPU pining and others that have enabled standard high volume servers to deal efficiently with edge functions such as BNG, PE router and EPC workloads. The key to achieving the carrier grade performance is to correctly model the key attributes required by the VNFs and exposing this information as the deployment decision criteria in the NFV delivery stack, i,e., the NFV Orchestrator and the VIM. The availability of such NFV-ready orchestration components together with appropriate standardized descriptors, such as TOSCA, will be key to enable large-scale, high-performance NFV deployments.
This year, at Mobile World Congress 2015, Cyan, Telefonica, Intel, Brocade, and Red Hat have collaborated to show a complete ETSI-NFV end-to-end service deployment solution stack at Mobile World Congress 2015 that includes this intelligent placement. The figure below illustrates how all the components come together using the ETSI NFV framework.
As illustrated in the figure above, in this collaboration;
Cyan has provided the multi-vendor Blue Planet NFV OrchestratorIntel has provided COTS servers, NICs as well as the latest DPDKBrocade has provided an OpenFlow switch and the Vyatta vRouterTelefónica has provided their VIM as well as their TIDGEN traffic generatorRed Hat has provided RHEL7.0 and the KVM hypervisorThe demonstration provides two separate deployment environments for comparing an NFV-optimized and an un-optimized cloud-based deployment:
An NFV-ready compute, networking and storage infrastructure, with a Telefónica developed NFV ready VIM implementing the requisite Enhanced Platform Awareness (EPA) and a Cyan NFV-Orchestrator supporting advanced VNF deployment using enhanced NFV information models.A standard cloud infrastructure - vanilla cloud computing, with the same Telefónica VIM connected to the same Cyan NFV-Orchestrator but in this case not using the enhanced information modelThe results show the phenomenal benefits achievable utilizing NFV optimized components, appropriate information models and an intelligent NFV orchestrator. The service deployed in this demo shows up to a 100x improvement in throughput for a typical routing scenario with respect to the same scenario in a typical cloud deployment. Join us at the Intel booth #3D30 at Mobile World Congress, March 2-5 for a demonstration of this ground breaking technology. |
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| From: FJB | 5/4/2015 10:13:39 AM | | | | | | Cyan Announces Pending Acquisition by Ciena; Releases First Quarter 2015 Financial Results
Cyan Inc.3 hours ago
PETALUMA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
Cyan Inc. ( CYNI), a leading provider of SDN, NFV, and packet-optical solutions for network operators, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Ciena ( CIEN) for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $400 million (or approximately $335 million net of cash). Cyan also announced financial results for its first quarter ended March 31, 2015.
Upon the closing of the transaction, Cyan shareholders will receive consideration equal to the value 0.224 shares of Ciena common stock (89% of which will be delivered in Ciena common stock and 11% will be delivered in cash based on the value of Ciena common stock at closing), as described more completely in the press release that is available on Ciena’s web site ( www.ciena.com). This exchange ratio represents approximately $4.75 per share of Cyan common stock, based on Ciena’s 20-day volume weighted average price as of May 1, 2015. Based on the closing price of Cyan’s stock of $3.65 on May 1, 2015, this reference price represents a premium of approximately 30%. Based on the structure of the transaction, Cyan’s outstanding warrants will be deemed to have been automatically exercised upon closing. In addition, Ciena will also assume Cyan’s outstanding equity awards.
“Since launching the first Z-Series packet-optical products in 2009, Cyan has introduced the world’s first integrated packet-optical platform, the world’s first deployment ready multi-vendor SDN controller and NFV orchestrator, and the world’s first disaggregated “bright box” optical system. Innovation is core to our business, and our innovation has always been focused on helping customers transform their networks. Joining forces with Ciena, another clear innovator in the networking space, will accelerate this transformation. Together, we will provide our customers with the technologies they demand for a software-controlled operational model, orchestrating services on top of a scalable network, with the ability to rapidly create revenue streams in the new virtualized, on-demand world. This combination enables greater monetization for network operators through more efficient utilization of network assets and faster time-to-market with differentiated and profitable services,” said Mark Floyd, chairman and chief executive officer, Cyan.
“After careful consideration and a comprehensive evaluation of strategic alternatives, our board of directors concluded that the opportunity to combine with Ciena represents the best possible outcome for shareholder value. The transaction has many strategic merits and the stock consideration allows shareholders to participate in potential future combination benefits. Our board of directors believes that being part of a larger, global platform enables the combined company to execute on Cyan's business more effectively and provides significant value to our customers and shareholders,” continued Floyd.
The Cyan board of directors has unanimously approved the transaction, which is expected to close in the third quarter, subject to Cyan stockholder approval and other customary closing conditions. Certain officers and directors and affiliated stockholders, including investment funds affiliated with certain directors, collectively holding over 40% of the outstanding shares of Cyan, have signed voting agreements committing to support the merger. Jefferies LLC is serving as financial advisor to Cyan. Houlihan Lokey Capital, Inc. also provided financial advice to the Cyan board. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati is serving as legal counsel to Cyan.
Cyan First Quarter 2015 Financial Results
Cyan also is announcing its results for the first quarter of 2015. Revenue for the first quarter of 2015 grew to $36.0 million, up 89 percent when compared with $19.0 million in the first quarter of 2014 and up 18 percent when compared with $30.5 million for the fourth quarter of 2014.
GAAP net loss for the first quarter was $52.9 million, or $1.11 per share, compared to a net loss of $17.8 million, or $0.38 per share, in the same period last year and a net loss of $15.0 million, or $0.32 per share, in the fourth quarter of 2014. The first quarter 2015 GAAP net loss includes a $41.3 million non-cash charge for the change in fair value of warrant and derivative liabilities associated with our convertible debt, which was primarily the result of a 60 percent increase in the company’s stock price during the quarter.
On a non-GAAP basis, Cyan's net loss for the first quarter was $6.8 million, or $0.14 per share. This compares to a non-GAAP net loss of $15.3 million, or $0.33 per share, in the same period last year and a non-GAAP net loss of $7.1 million, or $0.15 per share, in the fourth quarter of 2014. Both GAAP and non-GAAP net loss per share figures for the first quarter of 2015 are based on 47.8 million basic weighted average shares outstanding. |
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