Ericsson Purchases Majority Stake in Apcera

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 22, 2014) - On the heels of launching its enterprise-class, policy-driven IT platform called Continuum™, Apcera® today also announced that Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) has acquired a majority stake in the company. In addition, Ericsson has made a significant commitment to fund future operations and fuel growth and sales channel expansion. The all-cash deal is expected to close in Q4 2014 and marks the most significant investment to date in deploying the next generation of PaaS technology.

Apcera will retain its name and operate as a standalone company. Founder and CEO Derek Collison will continue as CEO. The company plans to immediately accelerate hiring as it prepares for expected growth.

"We welcome Ericsson's commitment to Apcera and look forward to delivering the next generation of PaaS technology to enterprises worldwide," said Derek Collison, founder and CEO of Apcera. "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 deployment and integration of Continuum across multiple industries."

"The beauty of the cloud is that it is much more efficient to develop, roll out and operate applications," said Jason Hoffman, Vice President and Head of Product Line Cloud Software at Ericsson. "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." 

The Apcera Vision
Apcera was founded in 2012 by former Google and VMware executive Collison with the intent of bridging the divide between developers and ops organizations with an enterprise-class platform that integrates policy and security from the start, enabling faster time-to-market without sacrificing crucial security requirements.

Earlier in his career, while at VMware, Collison designed and architected the industry's first open PaaS, Cloud Foundry. Collison saw the opportunity to go beyond the traditional PaaS. His vision was to build a modern platform capable of deploying a diverse set of workloads, from a basic operating system to a greenfield application and everything in-between, while presenting the proper layer of abstraction for each. He also believed that the platform should make it possible to transparently compose systems, without any code changes or dependencies. And most importantly, all of this should be on a policy-driven core that drives compliance, trust and safety. This vision has now become a reality, with today's launch of Continuum.

About Apcera
Based in San Francisco, Calif., Apcera has deployed the world's first policy-driven platform for global 2000 companies. Apcera's flagship product is Continuum, a platform that deploys, orchestrates and governs a diverse set of workloads, either on premise or in the cloud. The company was founded in 2012, with investment from True Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Rakuten, Andreessen Horowitz and Data Collective. For more information, visit apcera.com, read our blog or follow us on twitter: @apcera.