Elisa Polystar succumbs to Cardinality thoughts

Elisa Polystar, the international telecom software business of Elisa Group, has agreed to acquire UK-based Cardinality.

Should it get regulatory approval, the transaction is expected to close before September 30. Until then Cardinality ownership remains in the hands of current operational management and Maven Capital Partners.

Top brass at Polystar, not surprisingly, thought Cardinality was an excellent purchase. No financial details were disclosed but execs maintained it was an important step on the company's journey of "making self-driving networks happen."

"Cardinality enables effective data management at scale and allows operators to fully benefit from the cloud," said Polystar CTO Thomas Nilsson in prepared remarks. "In addition, it enables our subject matter experts to collaborate and develop new use cases for our existing service assurance and automation portfolios more easily and quickly."

Polystar sees the Cardinality portfolio as complementary to its own cloud-native automation and analytics "solutions," which are designed to bring down opex and capex for communications service providers' (CSPs), as well as "enhance" customer experiences.

The UK supplier, through its cloud native Cardinality.io platform, provides data management (DataOps), service assurance and customer experience analytics for CSPs.

The Cardinality.io platform, helped by AI-driven analytics, can purportedly handle "upwards of 50 billion events per day." The company further boasts that its DataOps engine "can easily move data from edge to core to cloud."

Cardinality originality

James Crawshaw, practice leader for service provider transformation at Omdia, a Light Reading sister company, is impressed by how far Cardinality has progressed since it was founded in 2015.

"Cardinality has a strong technology platform, which it has built and proved at scale with customers like Vodafone, Telefonica, Zain and Etisalat," he told Light Reading.

Although Cardinality.io is based on open-source components, added Crawshaw, which includes the likes of Kafka, RabbitMQ and MongoDB, the hard part is making them all work together in a cohesive solution. "It's a problem that Cardinality seems to have cracked," he said.

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Crawshaw points out that Cardinality has already integrated probes from Anritsu, EXFO, InfoVista, Netscout and Radcom, as well as performance management systems from Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia. "They have developed a number of use cases, some of which, like radio optimization and anomaly detection, employ machine learning," he said.

Crawshaw reckons that Polystar has a chance to become a "more significant player" in the service assurance market through the acquisitions of both Cardinality and Frinx, and build on the credibility it has already established with heavyweight CSP customers, including Bell, Telefónica and T-Mobile.

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— Ken Wieland, contributing editor, special to Light Reading