Microsoft has acquired mobile app-development platform provider Xamarin in a move that makes plenty of sense, and which has been a long time coming.
Xamarin's CTO Miguel de Icaza, who co-founded the open-source Mono project in the early 2000s. Mono is a cross-platform implementation of Microsoft's .NET software framework, which has become a pervasive part of enterprise IT. Icaza later formed Xamarin, which provides a toolset that allows developers to use .NET tools and C# to write mobile apps that the platform then cross-compiles to iOS, Android and Windows.
Other Xamarin assets include Test Cloud, whic provides developers with a test bed made up of more than 2,000 phones and devices.
Microsoft didn't disclose terms of the deal, but the Wall Street Journal reported its value was between $400 million and $500 million. Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's EVP of cloud and enterprise, laid out the rationale in a blog post:
Xamarin’s approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform. This enables developers to easily share common app code across their iOS, Android and Windows apps while still delivering fully native experiences for each of the platforms.
Xamarin has more than 15,000 customers in 120 countries, including more than one hundred Fortune 500 companies - and more than 1.3 million unique developers have taken advantage of their offering. Top enterprises such as Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola Bottling, Thermo Fisher, Honeywell and JetBlue use Xamarin, as do gaming companies like SuperGiant Games and Gummy Drop.
Microsoft has had a longstanding partnership with Xamarin, and have jointly built Xamarin integration into Visual Studio, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and our Enterprise Mobility Suite to provide developers with an end-to-end workflow for native, secure apps across platforms. We have also worked closely together to offer the training, tools, services and workflows developers need to succeed.
The Total Mobile Package?
Microsoft now believes the combination of Xamarin, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure will help it gain serious grown in the mobile app-dev space. Guthrie will reveal more plans about Microsoft's intentions for Xamarin at the Build conference in March.
"Microsoft keeps working under the parameters of build once and deploy everywhere—a vision that it shared first at its 2014 Build conference and delivered on at Build 2015," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "Now it's time to make the mobile development support even better, with the help of Xamarin."
The deal "also takes away one of the foremost concerns of enterprises using Xamarin: Depending on a small startup for a strategic software development tool," Mueller adds. "But make no mistake, Microsoft has not given up on native Windows 10 applications either. We will see how much Xamarin will help reinvigorate the Windows 10 mobile deployments. Build 2016 has gotten more interesting—we will be there."
Beyond improving the relevance of Windows Phone, Xamarin will give companies with large existing teams of .NET developers—and there are many indeed—a way to deliver high-performing mobile applications to enterprise users that prefer other platforms, particularly iOS, without the need to maintain separate code bases.
Meanwhile, if Guthrie needed any help from Xamarin developers regarding changes and improvements, he got a plethora of them in comments posted to his blog.
Top items on the wish list? Lower pricing that includes access to Microsoft's highly evolved Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment) and the repair of some lingering bugs in the software.
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