Fortinet, Certes Join Cyan’s Blue Orbit Ecosystem

Software-defined networking and packet-optical solutions provider Cyan (CYNI) has successfully added two new members to its partner ecosystem with the addition of Fortinet (FTNT) and Certes. Both Fortinet, which specializes in network security, and Certes, which provides multilayer encryption solutions for high performance networks, will join the Blue Orbit ecosystem, where they will focus on delivering multivendor SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV) applications to the channel.

“Interoperability in multivendor environments is critical for service providers deploying new infrastructure, especially as they place virtualized network functions, such as firewalls and encryption, across the network and close to the end user at the edge,” said Joe Cumello, chief marketing officer, Cyan, in a prepared statement. “We are pleased to welcome Certes and Fortinet to the Blue Orbit Ecosystem and further validate that SDN and distributed NFV can lessen the risk and accelerate the introduction of new services.”

Last month, Fortinet announced a new partnership with Palo Alto Networks (PANW) to co-found the industry’s first Cyber Defense Consortium, an organization dedicated to recognizing and eliminating cyber threats through industrywide education initiatives. In March, the company debuted four new distributed denial of service (DDoS) appliances aimed at detecting and preventing DDoS attacks through the use of single-path custom ASIC performance increases. In their first role as ecosystem partners, Fortinet and Certes will participate in an upcoming proof of concept demonstration at the Light Reading Big Telecom Event in Chicago next week.

“As a leader in enterprise network security, our participation in Blue Orbit provides us with the unique opportunity to gain real-world insights from production environments to help us move forward in our goal of making network services more secure, agile, elastic and scalable,” said Ryan Potter, director of Strategic Alliances at Fortinet.

Also in May, Cyan collaborated with Telefonica and Red Hat (RHT) to develop a new NFV architecture to support the deterministic placement of virtualized network functions. Cyan formed the Blue Orbit ecosystem last June as a way to demonstrate interoperability among SDN and NFV solutions from different partners to help lessen the risk network providers face when delivering SDN and NFV use cases. Other Blue Orbit members include Arista Networks, Canonical, RAD and Red Hat.