Pivotal adds mobile platform development with Xtreme Labs acquisition

EMC and VMware cloud spinoff Pivotal has acquired Toronto-based mobile development and consulting company Xtreme Labs in an all-cash transaction. Although other terms of the deal have yet to be officially disclosed, some in the industry are reporting the acquisition price tag is somewhere in the neighborhood of $65 million.

Founded in 2007, Xtreme Labs boasts an impressive mobile client portfolio that includes a number of major enterprise organizations such as American Express, CBS Sports, Facebook, Mercedes-Benz, NCAA, Twitter, and a number of other Fortune 500 brands across the retail, entertainment, and financial services industries.

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Beyond the impressive list of existing customers, the acquisition of Xtreme Labs is significant because Pivotal already has far-reaching tentacles across a number of technological areas that include cloud, big data, and platform as a service (Paul Maritz recently told InfoWorld’s Editor in Chief Eric Knorr, “You have to create a sense of mission and a sense of identity. It’s a great group and people are starting to really feel that they’re speaking to the future. We’re not playing defense here. We really are speaking to important things that will have real meaning. And that’s always the best tonic.”

Part of that offensive maneuvering is this first time acquisition of Xtreme Labs which will expand Pivotal’s role in the mobile application development market space.

The convergence of mobile, social, big data, and cloud is driving extraordinary change in the enterprise. To help customers win in this new era, Pivotal said it is enabling the creation of modern software applications that leverage big and fast data — on a single, cloud-independent platform.

In an official statement, Maritz said, “Every enterprise today has to exploit the opportunities offered by mobile. This requires new ways of thinking and working, and the need to get it right the first time and every time. We’re thrilled to bring next-generation mobile capabilities to our customers and welcome Xtreme Labs to the Pivotal family.”

With Xtreme Labs’ staff on board, Pivotal’s family could grow by an additional 300 employees that are dedicated to agile application development. By combining Xtreme Labs’ deep expertise and knowledge in mobile strategy and development with the Pivotal One enterprise PaaS solution, enterprise customers should be able to build applications cheaply, more quickly, and in a less disruptive manner to their business.

Xtreme Labs founders Amar Varma and Sundeep Madra wrote in an open letter that they were both fully on board with Pivotal’s mission of building game-changing applications that would help companies fuse data, analytics and the cloud; and they described their company as the “perfect complement to Pivotal.”

“When the opportunity to explore a relationship with Pivotal came up, it immediately became clear that we shared a common vision,” said Varma and Madra. The pair went on to state:

When combined, Pivotal and Xtreme Labs will be able to deliver the engineering prowess to build world-class applications and deliver them to customers across any device-web, mobile and others. Our customers will gain the expertise around big data, analytics, and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) that Pivotal delivers to customers across the globe. …

The best of what you know about Xtreme Labs continues. We will operate as usual, building best-in-class mobile experiences for the world’s most influential brands.

It’s been a busy few months for Pivotal and its executive team. While the company initially relied on partnerships gained from EMC and VMware, Pivotal has begun to make a name as an IT industry leader of its own. General Electric had a hand in kicking things off by providing the company with a $105 million investment so that it could deliver on a new cloud-agnostic platform. And in July, IBM followed that move up by throwing its weight behind the Cloud Foundry project. Now with the acquisition of Xtreme Labs’ mobility expertise, Pivotal’s technologies can be converged into a “new platform for a new era” with its PaaS solution, Pivotal One. The release date for Pivotal One, which will combine Cloud Foundry and Hadoop among other technologies, is set for the end of 2013.

This article, “Pivotal adds mobile platform development with Xtreme Labs acquisition,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.