Ericsson Buys Data Center Management Software Firm Sentilla

Swedish telco-equipment giant Ericsson has acquired Sentilla, a Redwood City, California-based company that develops data center management software for the IT side of the house.

As telcos add cloud infrastructure services to their portfolios and increase their use of software-based network management tools, there is an opportunity for vendors like Ericsson to provide them with new types of technology products. The acquisition brings additional technological capabilities to Ericsson’s existing products for infrastructure management as well as a team of experts in the field.

Sentilla has a robust data center management platform that provides visibility into current state and historical information about VMs, physical hosts, private and public cloud infrastructure. It monitors things like CPU usage, power consumption and cost and presents data through visualizations.

Ericsson said Sentilla’s platform was complementary to its Cloud Manager and Expert Analytics software products, although there is some overlap in functionality between Cloud Manager and Sentilla. Ericsson’s product also monitors resource usage, but it also has features like configuration management, security and self-service portals, among others, that Sentilla does not.

Expert Analytics is a whole different animal. Like the name implies, it is a data analytics system. It is geared toward network operators to help them manage quality of service for customers. It helps with things like identifying network congestion, device issues, incident analysis and overall network performance monitoring.

Mike Kaul, Sentilla CEO, said dynamic infrastructure management was an important capability for service providers to have. “By combining our capabilities with key Ericsson offerings, we can support dynamic optimization of workloads across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures, including constantly changing data center environments,” he said in a statement.