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Software-defined networking and network-functions virtualization have been good to Cyan, which is expecting revenue for the fourth quarter of 2014 to come in stronger than originally anticipated.
Cyan officials said earlier this month that they expect revenue for the quarter to come in between $30 million and $31 million, significantly higher than the previous guidance of $24 million to $26 million. The company is seeing stronger-than-expected demand for its Z-Series packet optical hardware and anticipates customers beginning to deploy its software-defined networking (SDN) and network-functions virtualization (NFV) products, according to Chairman and CEO Mark Floyd.
“We continue to believe that in the first half of 2015 we will convert some of our SDN and NFV trials into wins,” Floyd said in a statement. “Between the growing traction for our Z-Series hardware and the accelerating commercial interest we are seeing for our SDN and NFV software, we are excited about our role as the supplier of choice for critical network transformation technology.”
Cyan will announce fourth-quarter earnings Feb. 18.
The company has seen some recent wins with its Z-Series offerings. Cyan officials announced Dec. 22 that Windstream, based in Arkansas, will use Cyan’s technology to upgrade its regional and metro networks to 100G, leading to faster broadband service to residential subscribers and better IP services to small and midsize businesses, while also enabling the network communications vendor to better compete for data center and cloud opportunities, officials said.
A month earlier, KVH, an information delivery company in Japan, announced it was using Cyan technology to upgrade its backhaul network.
Cyan is one of a growing number of smaller companies that are looking to gain a larger foothold in the growing SDN and NFV markets. The technologies promise to enable service providers and enterprises to create more programmable, agile, automated and affordable networks by removing the control plane and network tasks—like firewalls and intrusion detection—from expensive underlying hardware and putting them into software that can run on less-expensive commodity systems.
Infonetics analysts in November 2014 said they expect the worldwide carrier SDN and NFV market to grow from less than $500 million in 2013 to more than $11 billion in 2018, and that NFV will generate the most revenue between the two during the period between 2014 and 2018.
Cyan, which launched its Blue Planet SDN platform in late 2012, went public in May 2013.