Ericsson to acquire majority stake in Apcera

In a bid to offer the full range of services, out of its cloud services offerings, Sweden's Ericsson is set to acquire a majority stake in the US-based, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company Apcera. The companies did not reveal further details of the all-cash deal, which would close in the fourth quarter of this year.

The Stockholm-based information and communications technology manufacturer and service provider saw PaaS as the "key to success" in the cloud.

With Apcera's platform, Continuum, enterprise users can deploy and manage diverse IT workloads either in the cloud, in their own facilities or via a hybrid approach.

The company founded in 2012, is led by CEO Derek Collison, who earlier served as an executive with Google and VMware, where he designed and built the PaaS platform Cloud Foundry.

He went on to start Apcera to develop a platform that incorporated policy and security considerations for faster time-to-market apps development and orchestration.

Apcera's official launch of Continuum came on Monday, the same day that Ericsson announced its investment.

"Unlike traditional PaaS, Continuum is an enterprise-class IT platform that integrates policy to enable faster time-to-market without sacrificing crucial security requirements," Collison said in a post on his company's blog. "Ericsson and Apcera share the same vision -- to be a significant force for disruption in the enterprise IT market."

In a press release Jason Hoffman, vice president and head of product line cloud software said, "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. With these technologies in place, enterprises and individuals can trust the integrity and the confidentiality of their infrastructure."

Derek Collison in the release,"We welcome Ericsson's backing. With a history of transforming the world's most demanding businesses and the global ability to deploy and scale critical infrastructure, Ericsson will enable us to accelerate our innovation of Continuum and provide enterprises the next-generation platform that enables them to achieve a significantly faster time-to-market as they deploy, orchestrate and govern a diverse set of workloads, both on premise and in the cloud."