Cerent

Cerent Corporation was a Petaluma, California optical-networking startup, founded in the mid-1990s and backed by Kleiner Perkins, that built the Cerent 454 — a compact next-generation SONET multiservice provisioning platform that collapsed traditional add-drop multiplexing into a far smaller, cheaper, data-aware box for carrier metro networks. Cisco Systems acquired Cerent in 1999 for approximately $6.9 billion in stock, at the time the largest acquisition in Cisco's history, and the product line shipped on as the Cisco ONS 15454, one of Cisco's most successful optical transport platforms. Cerent has not operated as an independent company since. Its hardware-era business predated public web APIs entirely, and it maintains no developer platform, documentation, SDKs, or API surface today — the cerent.com domain is now held by Cisco and serves only an acquisition notice. This profile is retained as a venture-portfolio historical record, not an active API provider.

Cerent is profiled on the APIs.io network. Tagged areas include Company, Networking, Optical Networking, SONET, and Telecommunications.

📡 Source on GitHub

0.6/100 minimal ▬ flat Agent 0/100 human only Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-09-08 · rubric v0.20.0

0 APIs

Company Networking Optical NetworkingSONETTelecommunications Networking Hardware Acquired Cisco

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-09-08 · rubric v0.20.0

Composite quality — 0.6/100 · minimal

Contract Quality 0.0 / 21

Developer Ergonomics 0.0 / 17

Access Clarity 0.0 / 17

Operational Transparency 0.0 / 11

Contract Governance 0.0 / 10

Discoverability 4.3 / 9

Regulatory Posture 0.0 / 15

Agent readiness — 0/100 · human only

Machine-Readable Contract 0 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 0 / 10

Documented Reversibility 0 / 6

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 0 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8

Request/Response Examples 0 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 0 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 0 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4

Delegated User Identity 0 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5

Registration Without a Human 0 / 6

Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Telecommunications regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

Create-or-Update Ergonomics could not be measured. We hold no machine-readable contract for this provider to read, so there is nothing to measure a write surface against. Excluded rather than scored zero: never-measured and measured-empty are different facts. Publishing an OpenAPI is what makes this facet — and several others — scorable at all.

The six quality facets above are damped to 85 points between them, because the conditional facet above carries the other 15. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 85% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/cerent: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Source (apis.yml)

aid: cerent
deliveryModel:
  model: unknown
  open_source: false
  commercial: false
  callable_host: false
  label: Delivery model not determined — needs a product licence on record
  confidence: low
  source:
  - none
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Unknown
  confidence: low
  source: []
  generated: '2026-07-22'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/cerent.png
name: Cerent
description: Cerent Corporation was a Petaluma, California optical-networking startup, founded in the mid-1990s and backed
  by Kleiner Perkins, that built the Cerent 454 — a compact next-generation SONET multiservice provisioning platform that
  collapsed traditional add-drop multiplexing into a far smaller, cheaper, data-aware box for carrier metro networks. Cisco
  Systems acquired Cerent in 1999 for approximately $6.9 billion in stock, at the time the largest acquisition in Cisco's
  history, and the product line shipped on as the Cisco ONS 15454, one of Cisco's most successful optical transport platforms.
  Cerent has not operated as an independent company since. Its hardware-era business predated public web APIs entirely, and
  it maintains no developer platform, documentation, SDKs, or API surface today — the cerent.com domain is now held by Cisco
  and serves only an acquisition notice. This profile is retained as a venture-portfolio historical record, not an active
  API provider.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/cerent/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
x-type: company
x-source: vc-portfolio
x-backed-by:
- kleiner-perkins
x-tier: stub
x-tier-reason: portfolio-lead
x-status: acquired
x-acquired-by: cisco-systems
x-acquired-year: 1999
x-successor-product: Cisco ONS 15454
x-active: false
x-api-provider: false
x-status-checked: '2026-07-20'
x-status-evidence: 'Probed 2026-07-20: cerent.com is delegated to Cisco nameservers (ns1/ns2/ns3.cisco.com) and publishes
  no A, MX, or TXT record; www.cerent.com is a CNAME to redirect.cisco.com and returns HTTP 302 to http://www.cisco.com/msgs/aquisition.html
  (Cisco''s acquisition-notice page). HTTPS on www.cerent.com fails certificate validation — the host is redirect-only.'
x-enrichment-note: No API, developer portal, documentation, OpenAPI, packages, or event surface exists to search, derive,
  or generate from. No provider artifacts were created and no artifact or link pointers were wired (no fabrication). Session
  WebSearch budget was exhausted, so this pass rests on direct DNS and HTTP probes, which were decisive.
specificationVersion: '0.23'
created: '2026-07-17'
modified: '2026-07-20'
tags:
- Company
- Networking
- Optical Networking
- SONET
- Telecommunications
- Networking Hardware
- Acquired
- Cisco
apis: []
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-07-20'
  status: nochange
  artifacts_added: 0
  pass: local-v1

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