A bit of vendor M&A is taking place over in Europe. The Swedish-based giant Ericsson said this morning that it intends to acquire the Polish and Ukrainian operations of Ericpol, bringing further software development talent in house.
Not much is likely to actually change with this deal of course. Ericpol is one of Ericsson's suppliers and Ericsson is by far its largest customer, even sharing half of its name by what I doubt is much of a coincidence.
Two thousand employees will switch over from -pol to -sson, but they'll surely be working on the same stuff. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2016.
However, the deal reflects the growing importance of software to vendors of all sizes.
The overall trends of virtualization whether in the data center or the network are raising the profile of the code relative to the circuits and optics, and thus the talent pool vendors want in-house is shifting to match.