ACG Research's business case examined the five-year total cost of ownership of Cyan’s packet-optical hollow core network solution versus comparable LSR and IP over OTN solutions. 

Demand for bandwidth is being driven by an increase in services and network traffic. As a consequence service providers’ margins and business models are being challenged. These factors as well as the attractive economics of 100 Gbps transport technology have prompted SPs to look toward opportunities to optimize their traffic flows, simplify their core network and minimize their need for routing.

Cyan addresses service providers’ requirements with its IP over Connection-Oriented Ethernet solution for the core network, which takes advantage of the economics of 100 Gbps transport technology, and Blue Planet, its SDN software. ACG Research compared the five-year TCO of Cyan’s core network solution with LSR and IPoOTN alternatives for a typical core network. The analysis finds that the TCO of the Cyan solution is 71 percent lower than the LSR alternative and 48 percent lower than the IPoOTN alternative. The packet optical transport platforms used by Cyan and IPoOTN operate at much lower cost than the router-derived technology of the LSR alternative, which is a significant part of the cost savings of Cyan’s platform and IPoOTN as compared to LSR. Cyan employs an open and virtualized SDN control plane that is more cost efficient than the proprietary and embedded G-MPLS distributed control plane used by IPoOTN. This accounts for the remaining TCO savings produced by Cyan as compared to IPoOTN.

Additional benefits of Cyan’s packet-optical core approach and its open SDN architecture include enabling the streamlining of business processes such as service delivery, supply chain, customer management and service creation. There is also the potential that the packet-optical core approach may ultimately eliminate the need for some core routers, which will produce an even more dramatic TCO reduction.

Cyan’s Blue Planet software includes the following capabilities whose benefits reach across multiple service providers’ business processes:

• End-to-end Provisioning
• Troubleshooting
• Service Level Agreement Assurance
• Network Planning and Design
• NOC Services

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