Erricson buys majority stake in Apcera’s cloud startup

The multinational giant Apcera is placing its feet in the platform-as-service (PaaS) world. The company launched its Continuum PaaS platform on Monday, on the same day Ericsson announced that it was buying a majority stake in privately held Apcera. However, the financial terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Apcera is a company which was founded by former chief architect of Cloud Foundry, Derek Collison. The company’s Continumm represents a new category product, a policy platform to impose controls on new applications as they get deployed for scalable operations. Continuum is able to track and monitor any application that it assigns policies to through its built in monitoring, out of the box. It can also be connected to systems management monitoring.

“A lot of times, shoulders shrug when it comes to discussing how an application will be protected by security. It has to be there on day one. If it is not based on policy at the core of the app, you end up with your name in the newspapers,” Collison said.

The policy platform monitors application operation after deployment and knows immediately if an app is violating the initially assigned policies while it is running. Continuum “marries policy evaluation with enforcement,” he said, without planting any Apcera code on the application or database server that it may be using.”If someone deletes a customer record, Continuum can tell you where that is happening” and impose a “no delete” command on the customer database within 50 milliseconds, Collison said. The command would be in effect for only the application that was used to delete the record; others would still be able to access the database, he says.

On the other hand, Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) is a leader in policy-based automation and governance of telecom networks. The acquisition shows the company’s ambition in extending that same approach into operator and enterprise clouds. Cloud is one of the strategic areas Ericsson is targeting for growth, and establishing leadership in PaaS is a key to its success, stated in a blog post.