IBM’s Acquisition of Worklight Advances Mobile Capabilities

Keywords: Smartphones, Tablets, Mobile Portfolio, Endpoint.

In a move that will help expand the enterprise mobile capabilities it offers to clients, IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire Worklight, a privately held Israeli-based provider of mobile software for smartphones and tablets. Financial terms were not disclosed.

With this acquisition, IBM's mobile offerings will span mobile application development, integration, security and management. Worklight will become an important piece of IBM's mobility strategy, offering clients an open platform that helps speed the delivery of existing and new mobile applications to multiple devices. It also helps enable secure connections between smartphone and tablet applications with enterprise IT systems.

Worklight accelerates IBM's comprehensive mobile portfolio, which is designed to help global corporations leverage the proliferation of all mobile devices -- from laptops and smartphones to tablets. IBM has been steadily investing in this space for more than a decade, both organically and through acquisitions.

As a result, IBM can offer a complete portfolio of software and services that delivers enterprise-ready mobility for clients -- from IT systems all the way through to mobile devices. This builds on IBM's deep understanding of its clients and their evolving IT needs over the last several decades. Today, the world's top 20 communications service providers use IBM technology to run their applications, while every day more than one billion mobile phone subscribers are touched by IBM software.

Worklight supports consumer and employee-facing applications in a broad range of industries, including financial services, retail and healthcare. For example, a bank can create a single application that offers features to enable its customers to securely connect to their account, pay bills and manage their investments, regardless of the device they are using. Similarly, a hospital could use Worklight technology to extend its existing IT system to allow direct input of health history, allergies, and prescriptions by a patient using a tablet.

Worklight Builds on IBM's Comprehensive Mobile Software and Services Offerings
Ubiquitous connectivity provides businesses with unique opportunities to better connect with their customer base, interact with external users and employees in more efficient ways, drive productivity and reach new audiences. IBM's strategy is to offer its customers a complete set of the software and services they need to effectively bring mobile devices into their business infrastructure. These capabilities include:

• Build and Connect Mobile Applications: The explosive growth of mobile has created a fragmented landscape for enterprises to support, often with limited budgets and skills. IBM's development and integration tools, complemented by Worklight, help clients to develop mobile applications and their supporting infrastructures for a variety of platforms just once - including Apple iOS and Google Android - while offering capabilities to securely connect to corporate IT systems.
• Manage and Secure Mobile Devices: As Bring Your Own Device or "BYOD" gains popularity, IT departments are looking to find an efficient and secure way to enable employees' use of mobile devices in the work place. Rather than implement a separate infrastructure solely for mobile devices, IBM's offerings are helping customers deliver a single solution that effectively manages and secures all endpoints. These unified capabilities can now extend from servers and laptops, to smartphones and tablets.
• Extend Existing Capabilities and Capitalize on New Business Opportunities: The rapid adoption of mobile computing is also creating demand for organizations to extend their current business capabilities to mobile devices, while capitalizing on the new opportunities that mobile devices uniquely provide. For instance, IBM's software, services and industry frameworks offer clients the ability to use mobile to engage with their customers around growing business opportunities such as analytics, commerce and social business applications.

In addition to Worklight, IBM is also unveiling IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices, a new software system that will enable corporate users to manage and secure their mobile devices these applications are running on.

IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices helps organizations support and protect the growing mobile workforce. Through this software, firms can use a single solution to secure and manage smartphones and tablets, as well as laptops, desktop PCs, and servers. It manages Apple iOS, Google Android, Nokia Symbian, and Microsoft Windows Mobile and Windows Phone devices.

The software extends security intelligence to deal with the growing threats from mainstream adoption of the BYOD trend. Organizations can install the IBM software in hours, remotely set policies, identify potential data compromises and wipe data off the devices if they are lost or stolen. The software helps configure and enforce passcode policies, encryption and virtual private network settings.

ARC Advisory Group