Microsoft has had a long relationship with Xamarin-integrating with the Xamarin tools, including Xamarin co-founder and CTO Miguel de Icaza in open-source strategy committees and even openly wooing de Icaza to join the software giant even before the founding of Xamarin more than four years ago.
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Neither company is saying much about what the deal entails at the moment, but Xamarin says we can expect more news at Microsoft’s Build conference in March, as well as Xamarin’s own Evolve event in April.
“Microsoft announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin, the leading platform provider for mobile app development”, a Microsoft representative told me.
Xamarin employs more than 350 people and has “tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue”, Friedman noted in a blog post today.
“This acquisition is a new beginning for Xamarin-the company and its products-and is an opportunity to help many, many more developers build great apps”, Mr. Friedman wrote. Xamarin lets developers target Windows, iOS and Android using the same C# program code.
Xamarin, based in San Francisco, counts Alaska Airlines and Coca-Cola Bottling among its more than 15,000 customers, Microsoft cloud and enterprise division chief Scott Guthrie wrote in a blog post on the deal. Xamarin’s tools assist Microsoft’s campaign to increase the developer pool for its mobile environments.
In addition to its C# dev tooling, Xamarin’s offerings include a Test Cloud for mobile app testing against a wide variety of devices, Xamarin Insights for real-time mobile app monitoring, and Xamarin University for live mobile training.
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Ignition’s Artale called Xamarin “a huge success” as measured by its daily usage by thousands of software developers around the world. This mobile-focused deal is all about developers, rather than individual apps for end users. “The broad adoption in a short period of time should be the envy of any software company. In the past six months, we’ve seen mainstream buyers become less concerned about this objection, as Xamarin has stood up enterprise mobile app case studies-but today’s acquisition removes that concern entirely”.
