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Apcera And Tropo Launch Telco Platform

This article is more than 9 years old.

Late last year commentators were fascinated at the news that Ericsson had purchased a majority stake in hot startup Apcera. This was interesting for a few reasons, firstly because Jason Hoffman, founder of Joyent and a well-respected cloud thought leader, had recently joined Ericsson to be its new cloud Tsar – the deal was Hoffman’s first stake in the ground. It was also interesting since many had picked Apcera as a serious player to watch. Founded by ex-VMware staffer Derek Collison, Apcera was still very stealthy, but had talked a little about what it was doing.

Apcera came out of work that Collison was involved with at VMware to create the Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS). But in an attempt to resolve some core issues he saw in the marketplace, Collison created Apcera as the world’s first policy-driven platform. The Apcera product, Continuum, is a PaaS that deploys, orchestrated and governs different workloads, but does so within the context of strong IT governance and policy.

When Ericsson made the investment in Apcera, they promised to leave it alone as an independent company – indeed Apcera remains firmly rooted in San Francisco while Ericsson’s headquarters is in Sweden. Indeed part of Jason Hoffman taking the role at Ericsson involved him relocating to Sweden.

Anyway, Apcera and communications developer platform vendor Tropo are today launching a joint platform. The two companies have partnered to offer a telco-specific communications platform on which can be built a policy driven (this part comes from Apcera), telco API rich (the Tropo part) development toolset. The joint solution is planned to be deployed on a Tier 1 carrier sometime in 2015.

This partnership should be seen in the context of trying times for telcos. While in theory they should be perfectly poised to benefit from the growth of cloud adoption, traditional telcos have been slow to react. Outliers like CenturyLink have done a great job of acquiring and developing cloud products, but they are the exception rather than the norm. Much of the blame for telco slowness can be put on the traditional telco culture which is anything but agile. But technology also has a part to play – traditional telco platforms don’t really encourage the innovative product development, pricing and packaging that are needed for telcos to really innovate – this new platform aims to remove that constraint for telcos.

It will be interesting to see how much success Tropo/Apcera have selling this joint platform – assuming Ericsson comes on board and pushes it they have a good opportunity. But without the big guns that Ericsson brings to the table, they might struggle against a risk averse telco industry that traditionally moves at a glacial pace.

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