IBM Plans to Buy Worklight to Advance Mobile Strategy

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IBM announced its plans to acquire Worklight, a move the company says will boost the mobile capabilities of its enterprise clients.

IBM signed a definitive agreement to acquire Worklight a privately held Israel-based provider of mobile software for smartphones and tablets. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

IBM officials said with this acquisition, IBM’s mobile offerings will span mobile application development, integration, security and management. Worklight will become a key piece of IBM’s mobility strategy, offering clients an open platform that helps speed the delivery of existing and new mobile applications to multiple devices. It also helps enable secure connections between smartphone and tablet applications with enterprise IT systems. The acquisition of Worklight is expected to close in the first quarter of 2012, IBM said. Worklight will sit within IBM’s Software Group.

In a recent IBM study of more than 3,000 global CIOs, 75 percent of respondents identified mobility solutions as one of their top spending priorities. Meanwhile, for the first time ever, shipments of smartphones exceeded total PC shipments in 2011.

“Our clients are under increased pressure to meet the growing demands of a workforce and customer base that now treat mobility as mission critical to their business,” said Marie Wieck, general manager of IBM application and infrastructure middleware, in a statement. “With the acquisition of Worklight, IBM is well-positioned to help clients become smarter mobile enterprises reaching new markets.”

Through both organic growth and acquisitions, IBM has built up its mobile strategy to the point where Big Blue can now offer a complete portfolio of software and services that delivers enterprise-ready mobility for clients — from IT systems all the way through to mobile devices. This builds on IBM’s deep understanding of its clients and their evolving IT needs over the last several decades, IBM officials said. Today, the world’s top 20 communications service providers use IBM technology to run their applications, while every day more than one billion mobile phone subscribers are touched by IBM software, IBM said.

Worklight supports consumer and employee-facing applications in a broad range of industries, including financial services, retail and healthcare. For example, a bank can create a single application that offers features to enable its customers to securely connect to their account, pay bills and manage their investments, regardless of the device they are using. Similarly, a hospital could use Worklight technology to extend its existing IT system to allow direct input of health history, allergies, and prescriptions by a patient using a tablet.

Worklight’s software enables organizations to efficiently create and run HTML5, hybrid and native applications for smartphones and tablets with industry-standard technologies and tools. Worklight s capabilities provide a complete and extensible integrated development environment (IDE), next-generation mobile middleware, flexible management and analytics. Worklight dramatically reduces time to market, cost and complexity while enabling better customer and employee user experiences across more devices, the company said.

To read the original eWeek article, click here: IBM to Acquire Worklight to Advance Mobile Strategy

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