Ericsson Buys Majority Stake of Apcera

Telecommunications giant Ericsson (ERIC) has acquired a majority stake in Apcera, a San Francisco-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider.

Ericsson said the addition of Apcera’s Continuum PaaS technology to its portfolio will allow enterprises to deliver complete cloud automation to run all workloads and use cases.

“The beauty of the cloud is that it is much more efficient to develop, roll-out and operate applications. 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,” Jason Hoffman, Ericsson’s vice president and head of product line cloud software, said in a prepared statement. “With these technologies in place, enterprises and individuals can trust the integrity and the confidentiality of their infrastructure.”

Apcera CEO Derek Collison said he believes his company’s customers ultimately will benefit from Ericsson’s support.

“Ericsson will enable us to accelerate our innovation of Continuum and provide enterprises with the next-generation platform that enables them to achieve a significantly faster time-to-market,” he said.

The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year. Apcera will operate as a standalone company after the closing and will be consolidated financially under Segment Networks.

Continuum, Ericsson and the PaaS market

The Continuum platform enables IT administrators “to deploy diverse workloads, orchestrate them as systems and govern them on-premise and in the cloud,” according to Apcera.

PaaS, meanwhile, could be a profitable market for Ericsson and other telecommunications companies.

A Dec. 2013 MarketsandMarkets study revealed the global PaaS market could be worth $6.94 billion by 2018.

MarketsandMarkets researchers also noted they expected the number of PaaS users to increase 43 percent next year.

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