To fill out its cloud services portfolio with policy and auditing controls, Ericsson is acquiring a majority stake in San Francisco enterprise services company Apcera.
Ericsson plans to incorporate Apcera's Continuum platform into its set of hosted offerings for telephone carriers and network operators, called the Ericsson Cloud System.
Apcera will remain a stand-alone company, using the Ericsson investment to expand its sales channel and continue to develop its technology.
Apcera was founded in 2012 by Derek Collison, one of the chief creators of the Pivotal Cloud Foundry management software, developed at VMware and now managed by Pivotal.
Continuum can work with either on-premises private clouds or public clouds, or in a hybrid model incorporating both.
The software provides a way for organizations to stage and run an application or set of applications as a cloud service. It can work with a wide array of applications and OSes.
For the cloud controller software, Collison focused on providing a set of policy and auditing capabilities. Continuum can handle employee credentials, allowing an organization to specify which applications, or which versions of applications, can be used by employees. The auditing capabilities can record how applications are used and who is using them.
Ericsson is a Stockholm-based provider of technology and services for telecommunication companies and large, IT network operations. The company has 115,000 employees, including 25,000 who work in research and development. It generated revenue of SEK 227.4 billion for 2013 (US$34.95 billion).
Ericsson Cloud System is based on the KVM (Kernel-based Hypervisor) and the OpenStack cloud controller software. It has a self-service administration portal as well as billing software and service analytics.
The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. Terms were not disclosed.
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com