Cisco to acquire Sedona Systems in latest optical move

Cisco Systems intends to acquire Israel-based Sedona Systems in a bid to add more network visibility and automated operation capabilities to its Routed Optical Networking family.

The deal, announced in a blog post by Kevin Wollenweber, vice president of networking for Cisco's Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group, comes a little over a month after Cisco announced its Routed Optical Networking offering, a major piece of the vendor's Converged SDN Transport blueprint, at the company's Cisco Live! event.

"Sedona Systems’ NetFusion is a market leader for its Hierarchical Controller (HCO) that enables multi-vendor, multi-domain automation, and software-defined networking," the blog post stated. "HCO is the brain that enables transformation like 5G network slicing, routed optical networking, and disaggregation. The Sedona NetFusion platform is the first to deliver complete network abstraction and control, allowing CSPs to manage their networks across domains, vendors, layers, and a myriad of different technologies, all as one single network."

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He added that NetFusion would work with the Crosswork network controller that was announced as part of the new offering at Cisco Live!. That controller helps operators migrate from traditional manual network operation and management to more automated processes in their increasingly disaggregated multi-vendor and multi-layer network environments. "Cisco Crosswork and Sedona NetFusion provide a real-time replica of the entire network to predictively manage any changes to the deployment, connectivity, and activation status of all network inventory," Wollenweber stated in the blog post. "Operators can preview optimization, assurance, and changes, and then commit them as needed."

Wollenweber offered no details about the financial terms of the deal, but business publication Calcalist estimated the deal to be worth about $100 million, according to a Times of Israel report.