Elisa Polystar acquires Cardinality to drive cloud-native capabilities

Elisa Polystar acquires Cardinality Ltd, a UK-based supplier of cloud-native data management (DataOps), service assurance and customer experience analytics for communications service providers (CSPs) globally.

By combining with Cardinality, Elisa Polystar will have stronger data management, AI-driven analytics and automation portfolio with comprehensive data ingestion and cloud-native capabilities enabling simultaneous top- and bottom-line improvements for network operators. With this transaction, Elisa Polystar is taking further steps on its journey to make self-driving networks happen.

The acquisition is consistent with Elisa Corporation’s strategy to grow digital services internationally and accelerate development of its telecom software business under Elisa Polystar.  The agreement was signed and the transaction is subject to local regulatory approval. The closing is expected during the third quarter of 2022, with ownership transferring from the current operational management and Maven Capital Partners.

Since Cardinality was founded in the UK in 2015, it has grown into an international business with about 70 experts. The company’s platform includes plugins for hundreds of different data sources and enables large-scale data management in on-premises, cloud or hybrid deployments. Cardinality has been ranked as the UK’s best-performing scale-up technology company in the Business & Consumer Software sector in the Megabuyte Emerging 25 review in 2022.

Steve Preston, CEO of Cardinality Ltd: “What the team at Cardinality has achieved since 2015 will now reach a new level as we join forces with Elisa Polystar. More data – 5G, cloud-native networks and the IoT – means new challenges, but also opportunities for network operators. The challenge is how to capitalise on all data to create revenue streams from new use cases. Cardinality solves this problem by giving network operators reliable access to its network data, in real time and scalable through the Cardinality.io platform. This data is made available to AI/ML-powered use cases across the business. Elisa Polystar’s products will advance this data platform by providing an automation solution with improved customer experience and cost benefits. We are excited to be able to offer these advanced solutions to customers, who will gain real, measurable value.”

Elisa Polystar is a world-leading network automation and service assurance solutions provider, serving over 120 CSPs globally. With its background as an international business of Finland’s largest CSP, Elisa Polystar’s solutions are proven and tested in live networks.

The technologies from Cardinality will complement and strengthen Elisa Polystar’s existing service assurance and automation portfolios. Success begins with a flexible data management platform, complemented by AI-driven analytics and completed with automation software.

Thomas Nilsson, EVP for Assurance & CTO at Elisa Polystar: “I look forward to welcoming the experts from Cardinality to Elisa Polystar. Gaining actionable insights to effectively operate and secure the customer experience in future networks based on cloud-native 5G and distributed edge deployment requires collection and correlation of data at scale from multiple domains and sources. Cardinality enables effective data management at scale and allows operators to fully benefit from the cloud. 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.”