# Cerent

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/cerent/  
**APIs profiled:** 0

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.

## Kin Score — 0.6 / 100 (minimal)

Scored 2026-08-21 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+0.0 from 0.6).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 50.0 |
| Contract Quality | 0.0 |
| Governance | 0.0 |
| Contract Governance | 0.0 |
| Operational Transparency | 0.0 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 0.0 |
| Commercial Clarity | 0.0 |
| Access Clarity | 0.0 |

Regulatory layer — **Telecommunications**: 0.0 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 0.0 (human-only)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | no |
| Agentic Access | no |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | no |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | no |
| Rate Limit Signal | no |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |

## Access

Unknown — onboarding: unknown, pricing: unknown, trial: no (confidence: low).

## Tags

Company, Networking, Optical Networking, SONET, Telecommunications, Networking Hardware, Acquired, Cisco

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/cerent/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.