After working quietly on software-defined networking (SDN) for nearly 18 months, Coriant announced Transcend today, claiming the industry's first “true SDN implementation.”

Big words for a company that's been under the radar for a year and a half, but SDN has been an important part of Coriant's strategy, says Stuart Benington, vice president of the cloud and SDN business unit. Transcend, aimed at service providers, is the culmination of that realization. It offers a programming environment with open interfaces that enable on-demand, application-centric service flexibility. It's comprised of two major pieces, the first being a software suite that includes:

• An orchestrator based on the OpenDaylight Project's framework. Coriant will also look to other companies and within to broaden the platform to expand on some of OpenDaylight’s limitations.
• The Coriant Transcend Transport Controller. The “transport” part is important, since Coriant's roots are in optical transport; the company includes the former optical networking division of NSN.
• The Coriant Transcend application suite, offering integration of Open vSwitch (OVS) functionality for network functions virtualization (NFV).

The second is the addition of SDN functionality to the Dynamic Optical Cloud products and services that Coriant announced earlier this year.

What supposedly makes Transcend a “true SDN implementation,” as Benington words it, is its multivendor, multilayer, and multidomain framework. (And, like every SDN vendor, Coriant is also boasting it's more open than others.) Many other products don't leverage all of SDN’s capabilities, Benington says.

Coriant is planning a live service trial of SDN with enterprise end-users with a Tier 1 service provider in Asia, Benington says.