Swedish telecom Ericsson demonstrated a big commitment to the cloud business today, by announcing that it’s taken a majority stake in Apcera, a startup with software for running applications in clouds or companies’ data centers. The deal gives new cloud capabilities to Ericsson but lets Apcera remain a standalone company, according to a news statement. On the surface, the deal puts Ericsson in the same camp as other telecommunications companies that have shelled out to enhance their cloud offerings. CenturyLink, NTT, and Verizon, among others, have already made cloud moves. Now Ericsson has set itself up to gain cloud mindshare.
Apcera is the developer of a service called Continuum which works across cloud, on premise and hybrid environments. Ericsson said with the addition of Apcera’s PaaS technology it will deliver complete cloud automation to run all workloads and use cases, while providing complete control for infrastructure. Cloud is one of the strategic areas Ericsson is targeting for growth, and PaaS is a key area of focus.
“The beauty of the cloud is that it is much more efficient to develop, roll-out and operate applications,” Jason Hoffman, Vice President and Head of Product Line Cloud Software, Ericsson said. “To realize the full potential, cloud environments need security and governance, which our partnership with Guardtime and our acquisition of a majority stake in Apcera provides. With these technologies in place, enterprises and individuals can trust the integrity and the confidentiality of their infrastructure.”
“I honestly think that this company and this deal [are] absolutely catalytic for everything being in a cloud environment over the next few years — that there will actually be a time before this deal and after this deal,” said Jason Hoffman, Ericsson’s vice president and head of product line cloud software, in an interview with VentureBeat.
Hoffman joined Ericsson from cloud provider Joyent last year. The Apcera deal marks the first major news to come from Ericsson since then.
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