Cisco's $140 million acquisition of IP/MPLS traffic management software vendor Cariden will boost the company's software-defined networking strategy for service provider customers.

Cariden's technology helps network operators perform real-time analysis of their network traffic and topology, and it helps service providers plan how they deploy new services on the network. This software will boost Cisco software-defined networking (SDN)-based traffic engineering capabilities for service provider customers, according to Kishore Seshadri, a director of product management with Cisco.

"For example, recently some over-the-top vendors have gotten to the point where they have applications in their data centers that can be scheduled, where they can decide when and where to place load on the network. It's a hard problem to solve without knowing what the network looks like," he said.

Better analytics for service provider customers of Cisco SDN

Incorporating these network analysis capabilities into the Cisco SDN initiative, known as