STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) has completed its acquisition of Vonage Holdings Corp. (Vonage) (NASDAQ: VG), supporting Ericsson's strategy to leverage technology leadership to grow its mobile network business and expand into enterprise. The acquisition provides Ericsson with access to powerful building blocks to offer a full suite of communications solutions including, Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS), UCaaS and CCaaS.

By leveraging the Vonage CPaaS offering, Ericsson aims to transform the way advanced 5G network capabilities are exposed, consumed and paid for. This will provide the global developer community, including Vonage's more than one million registered developers, with easy access to 4G and 5G network capabilities via open Application Program Interfaces (APIs).

For communications service providers (CSPs), global network APIs - such as location and quality of service APIs - provide new opportunities to expand their profit pools to monetize 5G network capabilities. For Ericsson, global APIs provide a new material growth opportunity. The existing market for communications APIs – such as video, voice and SMS – is currently growing at 30 percent annually and projected to reach USD 22 billion by 2025.

Accessing network capabilities in an open, intuitive, and programmable way via global APIs will enable developer communities to create applications for any device that benefits from connection to the 5G network. Developers can utilize network characteristics such as user authentication, bandwidth, responsiveness, energy efficiency, security, identification and reliability - or network information such as device information or predictive coverage.

These new and innovative consumer and enterprise applications will further drive the rollout of 5G and network Capex.

To accelerate growth in Vonage's UCaaS and CCaaS solutions, Ericsson intends to increase R&D investments and offer these solutions to CSPs, enabling Ericsson's existing customers to sell through their own brands, and accelerate growth. Ericsson will also complement existing communications offerings to small and medium sized companies with the Vonage UCaaS and CCaaS solutions which will form a strong part of Ericsson's offerings to both CSPs and enterprises.

Read the full announcement here.

Ericsson