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.

About Cyan

Cyan enables network transformation. The company’s software-defined network (SDN) solutions deliver orchestration, agility, and scale to networks, that until now, have been static and hardware driven. Serving carriers, enterprises, governments, and data centers globally, Cyan’s open platforms provide multi-vendor control and visibility to network operators, making service delivery more efficient and profitable. Cyan solutions include the award-winning Blue Planet SDN and NFV software and Z-Series packet-optical and N-Series hyperscale transport platforms. For more information, please visit www.cyaninc.com or follow Cyan on Twitter at twitter.com/CyanNews.

About CenturyLink

CenturyLink is the third largest telecommunications company in the United States and is recognized as a leader in the network services market by technology industry analyst firms. The company is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprise customers. CenturyLink provides data, voice and managed services in local, national and select international markets through its high-quality advanced fiber optic network and multiple data centers for businesses and consumers. The company also offers advanced entertainment services under the CenturyLink^®Prism^TM TV and DIRECTV brands. Headquartered in Monroe, La., CenturyLink is an S&P 500 company and is included among the Fortune 500 list of America’s largest corporations. For more information, visit www.centurylink.com.

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