Juniper Buys Data Center Interconnect Firm BTI

Juniper Networks, one of the world’s largest telecommunications and data center networking vendors, has acquired BTI Systems, a Canadian company that specializes in optical data center interconnect and metro interconnect technology.

Data center interconnect platforms are the backbone of today’s increasingly interconnected environments in multi-tenant data centers. Operators use them to connect enterprises to cloud service providers or network carriers or to interconnect various service providers who are partners.

Things like cloud exchanges, where a data center customer can buy and deploy multiple cloud services from a list of providers through a single portal, are also enabled by data center interconnect platforms like BTI’s. Metro interconnects link multiple data centers in a metropolitan area, creating essentially a single virtual data center.

Read more: Next-Gen Data Center Interconnect Tech Enables Explosion of Online Video and Cloud Services

Juniper, based in Silicon Valley, plans to integrate Ottawa-based BTI’s solutions with its Software Defined Networking controller called NorthStar, Jonathan Davidson, executive VP and general manager for development and innovation at Juniper, wrote in a blog post. The SDN controller, powered by the vendor’s Junos OS, automates traffic optimization on Wide Area Networks.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. According to Davison, they were “not considered to be material to [Juniper’s] financials,” Davidson wrote.

BTI customers include data center service providers CyrusOne, Equinix, Interxion, and Rackspace, as well as the Russian social networking giant VKontakte.