Telecom giant Ericsson has made a push into the cloud market after agreeing to buy a majority stake in Apcera, a San-Francisco-based software startup.
Apcera, founded in 2012 by former Google executive Derek Collison, main product is Continuum, which works across cloud, on premise and hybrid environments.
The Swedish firm plans to integrate the technology into its set of hosted offerings for telephone carriers and network operators, called the Ericsson Cloud System.
"The beauty of the cloud is that it is much more efficient to develop, roll-out and operate applications. To realise the full potential, cloud environments need security and governance, which our partnership with Guardtime and our acquisition of a majority stake inApcera provides," Jason Hoffman, Ericsson’s VP and Head of Product Line, said.
Apcera, which has 20 employees, said it will continue to operate under its current name as a standalone company.
Ericsson, which has 115,000 employees, said it will fund future operations and technology as well as global expansion of its enterprise sales channel.
The all-cash transaction is expected to close in the last quarter of this year for an undisclosed amount.
The deal comes after Ericsson team up with Guardtime to improve the safety and transparency of the data transmitted over its systems.
