Cisco continued its optical networking conquest this week with the acquisition of Sedona Systems to support its routed optical networking platform.

The announcement comes after a hard-fought battle to acquire optical networking vendor Acacia for $4.5 billion earlier this year, which produces, among other things, optical pluggable modules and digital signal processors (DSP). Now, Cisco has turned its attention to the next challenge: automation. That’s where Sedona Systems' NetFusion platform comes in.

“With Sedona NetFusion joining the Cisco Crosswork portfolio, we will deliver the most advanced automation platform for Cisco’s routed optical networking solution,” Kevin Wollenweber, VP and product manager of service provider network systems at Cisco, wrote in a blog post.

The hierarchical controller (HCO) is designed to automate multi-vendor, multi-domain networks and is “the brain that enables transformation like 5G network slicing, routed optical networking, and disaggregation,” he explained.

The platform works by automatically discovering the packet and transport layers and stitching them together to provide insights and automate network control.

According to Wollenweber, the combination of Cisco Crosswork, the company's in-house network automation platform, and NetFusion will provide users with a real-time replica of the entire network and allow operators to predictively manage changes made to a deployment, connectivity, and activation status of all network inventory.

This has several benefits for communications service providers both from an operational and customer experience standpoint, he said. These include making it easier for service providers to acquire domain-specific network data, understand how layer-1 domains are interconnected, integrate multi-vendor networks, as well as visualize and automate networks to reduce costs.

“Typically it cost [$5] to operate for every [$1] spend on equipment annually,” Wollenweber wrote. “That must change. Together, Cisco’s Crosswork network automation and Sedona’s NetFusion unify and modernize optical and IP operations.”

With the acquisition of Acacia, Cisco has cemented itself as an optical networking heavyweight. And at this year’s Cisco Live event, the company shared its vision for connecting the rest of the world.

“There are still three billion people around the entire world who remain unconnected or underserved,” said Jonathan Davidson, SVP and GM of mass-scale infrastructure at Cisco.

And according to Cisco, achieving this goal comes down to economics, and lowering the cost of operating the network.

“We need to rethink the fundamentals of the internet. We need to simplify how networks are built so that we can close the digital divide,” Davidson said at the time.

In addition to Acacia’s pluggable transceivers, Cisco has also invested heavily in custom silicon for switching and routing applications through its Silicon One family. The latest of these chips is capable of 25.6 Tb/s of throughput.