Microsoft Buys Xamarin, Deal Provides Total App Development
- by Gavin O'Malley @mp_gavin, February 24, 2016
Microsoft has agreed to acquire Xamarin, a platform provider for mobile app development. Longtime partners, Microsoft has built Xamarin integration into Visual Studio, Microsoft Azure, Office 365
and the Enterprise Mobility Suite. The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
“The combination of Xamarin, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure provides a complete mobile app dev solution,” stated Scott Guthrie - Executive Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise Group at Microsoft.
Xamarin helps developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver native mobile app experiences across iOS, Android, and Windows platforms.
Used by roughly 1.3 million developers around the world, Xamarin presently have about 15,000 paying customers, Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola Bottling, Thermo Fisher, Honeywell and JetBlue.
With the acquisition, the tech giant is promising deeper integration and better mobile app development services.
More broader, Microsoft continues to play catch-up in the mobile arena.
Among other moves, the company recently dropped $250 million on keyboard app maker SwiftKey. With the deal, Microsoft was apparently after SwiftKey’s artificial intelligence assets -- which supported the recent launch of an Android keyboard that uses a neural network in place of standard algorithms to predict one’s word selection.
Late last year, Microsoft bought Talko, a Boston-based startup that specializes in helping groups of people -- in business, family or other settings -- collaborate using their smartphones.
