Ciena has added 30 new members to its Blue Orbit Ecosystem, a group the company formed to support collaboration between customers and vendors. The new partners include Akamai, Ammeon, Check Point, EMC, Netrounds, and ON.Lab, among others.

Blue Orbit, which now has 64 partners, is part of Ciena’s Blue Planet division that handles the Blue Planet network functions virtualization (NFV) orchestration platform.

When asked about the specifics of what these partnerships mean, Ciena was vague. “Blue Orbit is designed to advance collaboration and build on the capabilities we have today with respect to multi-vendor and multi-domain orchestration of physical and virtual resources. Each partnership will be unique and will evolve depending on what our customers are asking for from us,” said Jim Brinksma, VP of strategy & business development in Ciena’s Blue Planet Division.

Ciena says it has created four categories of the Blue Orbit Ecosystem: Blue Orbit Community Member, DevOps Partner, Service Partner, and Technology Partner.

CenturyLink is one of BluePlanet’s high-profile customers. CenturyLink uses BluePlanet’s orchestration for its programmable services backbone that makes it possible to deliver virtualized services to its enterprise and SMB customers.