When Ericsson completed its acquisition of Vonage almost two years ago, there was still widespread bemusement about its motivation to spend $6.2 billion on a company that was chiefly associated with declining telco opportunities such as VoIP. However, the Swedish vendor set out a compelling vision of taking Vonage’s underlying communications platform, and its technology for aggregating third party APIs (application programming interfaces) and turning them into a key enabler of new-generation services for its operator customers. The realization of the strategy has been slow, and last October, Ericsson took a $2.94 billion non-cash charge in its third quarter to reflect the diminished value of its purchase over the first year of ownership. Now, Verizon has announced that Vonage is…