Lightreading covered Ciena’s acquisition announcement of Tibit and Benu, two broadband access and fiber management companies. Kyle Hollasch provided his opinion on the reasoning and justification behind Ciena’s actions.
Ciena has already announced a number of product enhancements and customer wins specifically using 10G PON transceivers housed within their access and aggregation switches. The Tibit acquisition brings a degree of vertical integration into an application that Ciena considers an important differentiator.
Traditional edge routers include tightly integrated subscriber management, but virtual and/or cloud-based BNG [broadband network gateway] functionality is gaining traction, and this is where Ciena sees its opening. The Benu acquisition bolsters Ciena’s expertise in this area as they increase scale and move up the stack to become a more full-featured router vendor.
— Kyle Hollasch, Lead Analyst for Transport Hardware at Cignal AI