IBM buys Worklight for mobile apps
Adds cross-platform development tools and enterprise gateways to a growing wireless offering for corporations
Published: 31 January, 2012
READ MORE: M&A | IBM | Applications | Infrastructure
IBM has made the latest in a string of acquisitions designed to boost its mobile enterprise platform, as newer entrants to the big corporate field, notably Google, bite at its heels. IBM has agreed to acquire privately held Worklight, whose software simplifies development, delivery and securing of cross-platform mobile applications.
Founded and largely based in Israel, and headquartered in New York, Worklight's Studio product provides an integrated development environment (IDE) for creating apps which can run across iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Windows. The company also offers Worklight Server, a secure gateway between the mobile apps and the enterprise back end systems, as well as to external and web services. Terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the first quarter, were not disclosed.
Worklight is an established IBM partner and claims to "enable rich, cross-platform apps without requiring code translation, proprietary interpreters or unpopular programming languages."
Also boosting its smartphone strategy is IBM's newly released Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices, which is based on technology from another wireless enterprise acquisition, 2010's BigFix. This will play in the increasingly important mobile device management (MDM) space, where enterprises are starting to invest large sums as they try to control the rising number of handsets, tablets and wireless notebooks accessing their central databases and services. The IBM offering will secure and manage those devices, enforce corporate access and security policies, and support remote data removal if they are lost or stolen.
The news follows IBM's announcement, in November, of its Mobile Management Service, a hosted offering designed to provide security and control for devices running iOS, Android, BlackBerry OS, Symbian and Windows Phone. That came after RIM added MDM facilities to its BlackBerry Enterprise Server and claimed it was putting specialized providers in this sector - at least 20 of them - "on notice". Google quickly responded with the announcement that it would soon add MDM to its browser-based Google Apps, with support for Android, iOS and Windows.
IBM set out a much expanded mobile enterprise stall in June 2010 when it opened a huge new software R&D center in Littleton, Massachusetts, whose major focus is on mobile apps and services. In particular, IBM has been expanding its range of back end software platforms for wireless operators, aiming to help them create new web services for their corporate customers.
"We're shifting attention in mobile from a device perspective toward things we can't see," said Al Zollar, general manager of Tivoli, IBM's key back end and middleware system for the enterprise, at the Littleton launch.
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