The result is Blue Planet, controller software that has the ability to work with any vendor’s switches and underlying gear as well as APIs that let gear and applications sitting above the Cyan controller software talk to networking hardware. The product is akin to the controller software that Big Switch and Nicira sell. Big Switch just raised a $25 million Series B round of funding, while this summer Nicira was bought by VMware in a deal valued at $1.26 billion.

The catch for Cyan is that its primary market isn’t the data center, although Cyan Co-founder Eric Clelland notes that the company’s controller software can work there as well. But the target market is core Cyan customers (there are 120 of them so far) of ISPs and carriers who have already been buying its packet optical networking gear. Clelland said the company’s sales, while undisclosed, have grown at 100 percent year over year. He declined to discuss revenue profitability or the number of employees, but said the company is on a run rate to break $100 million in sales in 2012.

So far,with Blue Planet, Cyan is offering a slight twist on the traditional software defined networking story. First is that it’s going after a different market than many of the other vendors, although Nicira does have deployments with both AT&T and NTT both communications companies with IP transit businesses. Carriers may move more slowly than the large data center customers, but they are desperate to find cheaper ways to manage their networks as well as build services on top of their networks. This is slightly different from Nicira’s promise of SDNs as a way to virtualize networking, i.e., abstract the physical networking hardware from the virtual machines — giving data center operators more flexibility.

Instead the Cyan vision is closer to the promise that software defined networks will bring programmability to networks and allow applications to talk to the network directly. With both a northbound and southbound API, Cyan’s controller lets applications talk to the switches and the switch can talk to the applications. Most providers offer a northbound API that lets the switch talk to the applications, but that’s about the extent of the “conversation.”

Cyan also offers its own apps that customers can deploy as part of the overall Blue Planet software –although customers can build their own. However, I can see several of the smaller metro Ethernet providers and cable companies who are Cyan customers buying up an existing solution rather than rolling their own. Apps might include real-time bandwidth management based on customer demand and existing policies or dynamic bandwidth delivery for certain customers. The company’s controller software works with both Open Flow-compliant devices as well as legacy gear — another mark in its favor since few companies are likely to get excited about ripping out their old network to use SDNs.

As more companies emerge in this space with different philosophies around software defined networking, different views of the OpenFlow protocol that has all but disappeared from many conversations, and even different end customers, there’s no shortage of both marketing and opportunity. I think Cyan has certainly found an opportunity — after all it’s customers have long appreciated its software as well as its boxes — and I look forward to seeing how the metro Ethernet and carrier space deploys SDNs.

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This big societal move to a more connected life is causing carriers to spend a lot of money upgrading (or building) new networks, even the smallest cable companies in the farthest corners of America. And for Mike Hatfield, that is great news. Today he announced that his 3-year-old company, Cyan Optics, has signed up nearly 20 carriers –- though none of the major guys, to be sure –- and has raised at least $27 million in three rounds of funding from venture capital companies including Azure, Grande Ventures, Kinetic Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners. Juniper Networks is an investor as well.

I’ve known Hatfield for a long time; he’s a good proxy on the state of the optics and networking industries. Back during the first Internet bubble, he made out like a bandit when Cerent, an optical gear maker he was associated with, was sold to Cisco Systems for $8 billion. Later he started Calix, another networking gear maker, and now Cyan Optics. His co-founder at Cyan is Steve West, who also helped found Turin Networks, which merged with Force 10 Networks. West is also Cyan’s CTO.

Hatfield is good at spotting opportunities and building products that the market might need a few years down the road. Of course these are priced much lower when compared to the incumbents. At Cerent, he and his team built a cheaper SONET transport box for optical networks. At Calix, they built a cheaper digital loop carrier system. And Cyan has built a replacement for multiservice Sonet/SDH. The new gear is a pure optical transport system, one that allows carriers to pump out more data while keeping costs under check.

Hatfield and West belong to a group of telecom and optical insiders who reside in and around Petaluma, Calif., some 100 miles or so north of Silicon Valley, and often work very closely with carriers. Cyan claims that its packet optical transport system (a combination of hardware and software), because of its ability to function at the optical level, makes it more capable than its competitors. Cyan has a portfolio of products, including a management software platform that is built to handle today’s networks -– its highest-end equipment is twice and in some cases three times as capable as gear from incumbents such as Ciena and Fujitsu. David Huber, who started Ciena, is an investor via his venture fund, Grande Ventures.

A typical broadband network can be roughly divided into two parts: the access network, which connects you and me to Comcast’s central office, and the rest of the network, often called the middle mile, which connects to the Internet via regional, metro and long-haul fiber connections. Cyan is going after the latter, the transport networks. In its press release, the company says:

The Cyan Z-Series (www.cyanoptics.com/solutions/solution-overview) includes the Cyan Z33 and Z77 multi-layer transport platforms that modularly combine packet, TDM and optical add / drop multiplexer, cross-connect and transport functionality in highly integrated platforms supporting over 100 Gbps per slot. The Cyan CyMS (www.cyanoptics.com/solutions/cy-ms) is the first management system that provides full multilayer visibility and business intelligence. The result is a new generation of packet optical transport solutions that meets the current and future cost and scalability demands of today’s service provider networks.

“The Cyan Z-Series takes packet optical transport systems to a new level of multilayer integration in both hardware and software,” stated Michael Howard, principal analyst of carrier and data center networks at Infonetics Research. “I especially like the breakthrough innovation of multilayer management comprising visualization, planning, provisioning, and control, which will help make service providers’ operations fundamentally more efficient. This is one of the best new products I’ve seen in years.”

Many of these products have been talked about for years. In an ideal world, Cisco would have developed some of these technologies as next-generation Cerent products. When I talked to Hatfield last week, he pointed out that the carriers want to deliver more bandwidth and yet keep the costs of delivering that bandwidth low, otherwise the network economics breakdown. Cyan was started to address this quandary, he said.

Cyan may have snagged 20-odd customers and can boast a pedigree, but that doesn’t mean it can waltz its way to victory (or exit). There are about nine other companies with similar product plans, according to Heavy Reading, a market research company. But in light of his two successes, it makes sense that this time, Hatfield has some competition :-)

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