Ciena today said it will acquire privately-held software provider DonRiver. DonRiver’s technology provides service inventory management software for service provider operational support systems (OSS) environments. This technology will be integrated with Ciena’s Blue Planet software portfolio. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Ciena’s Blue Planet portfolio consists of multiple products and capabilities: multi-domain service orchestration (MDSO), NFV orchestration, analytics, a network health predictor, route optimization and assurance, virtual WAN, and SDN-based domain control for Ciena packet and optical networks.

Ciena will acquire the entirety of DonRiver's product portfolio. At the center is its federated inventory solution, Fusion, which creates a unified inventory to improve an organization's business process definition and execution.

According to Rick Hamilton, Ciena SVP of global software and services, "With the addition of DonRiver’s federated inventory solution, Blue Planet is now able to provide a unified view of all elements across a provider’s network that are used to provide a service, both passive and active." When this is integrated with either Blue Planet MDSO or its Manage, Control, and Plan (MCP) capability, a company's inventory becomes informed with real-time network information, he said.

The benefit is is lower order error rates, improve network resource planning and utilization, and reduce capex and opex.

Once integrated, DonRiver’s network and service inventory management software will enhance Ciena Blue Planet’s Adaptive Network vision. The Adaptive Network vision provides customers with analytics and intelligence, software control and automation, and programmable infrastructure to ensure that networks can adapt to change.The single operational control point created by the integration of DonRiver and Blue Planet will add closed-loop automation of network services and operations processes across the network.

The DonRiver team will form a specialized services group within the Blue Planet organization. This group of 175 OSS experts will manage modernization projects for both IT and network operations.

Hamilton noted that DonRiver Fusion aligns with Blue Planet's future strategy, particularly its vision to "advance Blue Planet’s multi-domain inventory topology and visualization capabilities to enable closed-loop automation." He added, "DonRiver is an example of this strategy in action and will contribute toward our long-term financial goal of growing our software and associated services business by 14 to 16 percent annually over the next three years."

The deal is expected to close during Ciena’s fiscal fourth quarter 2018.

This July, Ciena completed its acquisition of Packet Design. Packet Design’s network performance management software will also be integrated into the Blue Planet software portfolio.