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Pivotal in Mobile App Play With Xtreme Labs Buy

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Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz

Pivotal CEO Paul Maritz

Pivotal Inc., the Big Data and cloud-focused joint venture of EMC Corp. and VMware Inc. with funding from General Electric Co., is starting to make some noise announcing this week the acquisition of Toronto-based mobility specialist Xtreme Labs in a play aimed at agile mobile application development in the enterprise.

Immediate fruits of the acquisition for an undisclosed sum should find Xtreme Labs’ assets combined with Pivotal’s application and data infrastructure software and its cloud Foundry-powered Enterprise PaaS product into a powerhouse mobile app development unit with more than 500 employees worldwide, according to company officials.

Published reports indicated the all-cash acquisition price was in the neighborhood of $65 million.

The six-year-old Xtreme Labs is a full-service mobile strategy and product development firm that boasts a number of high-profile Global 2000 clients in verticals such as banking, media, retail, enterprise and health care. The addition of Xtreme and its laser focus on mobile applications fills a hole in Pivotal’s cloud application development portfolio.

“Every enterprise today has to exploit the opportunities offered by mobile,” said Paul Maritz, the former Microsoft exec and VMware CEO, who now serves as Pivotal’s chief executive. “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,” said Maritz.

Earlier this year, Martiz said Pivotal would build its own channel program, targeted primarily at enterprise partners. The company is expected to rely on a variety of partners, mostly ISVs, to either develop new applications for its platform, or to add new capabilities to their existing applications via Pivotal.

Xtreme Labs co-founder Amar Varma sees the acquisition as a way to address the needs of a market where many aspects of cloud applications and mobility are merging with a more singular, integrated solution.

“We share Pivotal’s belief that the convergence of mobile, social, Big Data, and cloud is driving extraordinary change in the enterprise,” said Varma. “It is something we see every day with our customers.

“By joining forces with Pivotal, we can bring our strong heritage, that of helping the world’s most important companies succeed in mobile, to help an even greater number of companies to win in a new era,” Varma added.