IBM's Worklight Acquisition: Few Thoughts

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Two days back IBM announced their plans to acquire Worklight, the Israel based mobile development platform, to beef up their enterprise mobile strategy. IBM realizes that in this era of BYOD/Consumerization of IT, they need to had a strong mobile strategy supporting various platforms. In fact, at the recent Lotusphere 2012 conference, IBM showcased their mobile strategy. They have built mobile apps that offer seamless feature set across different mobile platforms, a core attribute I highlighted in my position paper on enterprise software. IBM understands the need to have a development platform that will help enterprises and ISVs implement this core attribute in their applications.

With the Worklight acquisition, they can now offer a mobile development platform that will let enterprise IT or ISVs write hybrid apps that can work seamlessly with IBM’s enterprise offerings. Worklight platform is pretty powerful and versatile offering wide range of features including

an easy way to develop HTML5, Hybrid and Native apps.
allows for code reuse, pretty important in enterprise development
an easy and secure way to deliver these applications
an integrated feature to manage mobile and infrastructure

It will be interesting to see how it plays out and I hope I get to see some numbers on how this development platform is used by the enterprises and other ecosystem partners.