Ericsson today announced it has acquired NodePrime, a San Francisco-based startup that helps enterprises manage their data centers. NodePrime came out of stealth last September after the company raised $7 million in seed funding from Menlo Ventures, NEA, Formation 8, Initialized Capital, Crosslink Capital, Rubicon Venture Capital, and TEEC Angel Fund. Ericsson also participated in this round and was already using the service internally before NodePrime emerged from stealth.
Although the financial details of today’s acquisition were not disclosed, Ericsson says NodePrime’s employees will join Ericsson and the company plans to integrate NodePrime’s technology into its Hyperscale Datacenter System 8000 — its platform for automatically discovering, configuring and managing data center hardware.
“Our vision from the start was to transform the infrastructure into a single entity where it’s entirely possible to grasp the management of hyperscale data center infrastructure through the collection of trillions of  associated metrics inside one view,” NodePrime co-founder and CEO James Malachowski said in today’s announcement. “Now being part of Ericsson, we further strengthen and expand Ericsson’s position as an industry leader in next-generation software-defined datacenters. Together we are creating a massive power shift for enterprises to make decisions on their own terms and scale with precision at the speed at which businesses need to respond today.”
NodePrime is one of a number of startups that aim to accelerate the move to software-defined infrastructure for data center operators. The service allows admins to map all the servers in their data centers and monitor their performance.
“We at Ericsson continue to accelerate the creation of the software defined datacenter market, to benefit our customers. NodePrime has unique talent and was a clear choice to bring inside Ericsson,” Ericsson’s head of its cloud and IP business unit Anders Lindblad said. “We believe in innovation coming from the Silicon Valley area and will continue to increase our presence and distribution of such innovation”
Given that Ericsson was already using NodePrime, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the company argues that making this acquisition will now allow it to “reduce sourcing risk and secure control of roadmap direction and acceleration.”

