Cisco Thursday said it will acquire privately held Cariden Technologies, a maker of network planning, design and traffic tools for telecom service providers.

Cisco will pay about $141 million in cash and retention-based incentives and, after the close of the acquisition, Cariden will become part of Cisco's Service Provider Networking Group under Shailesh Shukla, vice president and general manager, Software and Applications Group.

The company's specialty is capacity planning and management tools for IP/MPLS networks, and Cisco plans to leverage Cariden's technology in its nLight platform for IP and optical convergence, as well as for WAN orchestration. The idea, according to Cisco, is that service providers will be able to make their network infrastructure more programmable and more efficient.

"Given the widespread convergence of IP and optical networks, Cariden's technology will help carriers more efficiently manage bandwidth, network traffic and intelligence," Surya Panditi, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco Service Provider Networking Group, said in a statement. "This acquisition signals the next phase in Cisco's packet and optical convergence strategy and further strengthens our ability to lead this market transition in networking."

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Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Cariden has a number of major partnerships in the networking space, with Cisco as well as with some of its biggest rivals, including Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper. It's been a member of Cisco's Developer Network Partner Program for a number of years and has a substantial reseller and system integrator program.

After a year of minimal M&A activity during its global restructuring, Cisco in 2012 returned to its usually frequent pace of acquisitions, most recently buying cloud-managed networking specialist Meraki for $1.2 billion. Among its acquisitions in the past six months have been NDS Group, vCider, ThinkSmart, Virtuata and Cloupia.

PUBLISHED NOV. 29, 2012