Ericsson today announced it has completed the acquisition of Ambient Corporation, a US-based award-winning provider of smart grid communications technology for utilities.
Ambient’s innovative platform enables utilities to deploy and integrate multiple smart grid applications and technologies, in parallel on a single communications infrastructure. The acquisition increases Ericsson’s ability to help utilities maximize their investments in smart grids.
Ambient also provides product and software maintenance and implementation services, as well as a variety of smart grid consulting services related to product development, network management, and smart grid architecture and deployment.
Ambient will be integrated into Ericsson’s Global Services organization, which employs 64,000 services professionals based in 180 countries and speaking more than 100 languages. Around 16,000 of these employees are Consulting and Systems Integration (CSI) professionals who deliver more than 1,500 CSI projects in multivendor and multi-technology environments every year.
As a global communications leader with extensive multivendor systems integration experience, Ericsson is well placed to partner with utilities as they transform their electricity distribution grids into smart grids.
Magnus Mandersson, Executive Vice President and Head of Business Unit Global Services at Ericsson, says:
“At Ericsson we are increasingly using our experience in communications and providing managed services for networks that serve more than 1 billion subscribers worldwide to assist partners and customers in the utilities sector. We’re helping utilities to adopt new types of applications and enable new business models, and I believe Ambient could make a big contribution to that effort.”
The Ambient smart grid communications platform, which includes hardware and software elements, provides utilities with an efficient, secure, two-way, open IP network architecture. The platform supports multiple communications technologies in parallel, including cellular, Wi-Fi, radio frequency (RF) and power line communications (PLC), and also provides serial and Ethernet connections. The platform enables the integration of various smart grid applications, such as smart metering, demand response, distribution automation and monitoring, and direct load control into a common infrastructure.
