There was one notable enterprise mobility acquisition announced at MWC last week, Microsoft (finally) acquired Xamarin.

Just 24 hours after acquiring cross-platform mobile tool developer Xamarin, Microsoft announced that it was officially killing its Windows Bridge for Android program (dubbed project “Astoria”). The company's Bridges strategy is focused on providing developers with tools to accelerate bringing their apps to Windows 10 devices. Microsoft released its Windows Bridge for iOS as an open source project this past summer-the tool enables developers to bring Objective-C iOS apps to the Windows app Store. So what about Android? Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform won't very universal without Java/C++ in the mix (Web and .NET & Win32 applications are covered as part of the Bridges strategy). Fortunately for Microsoft, Xamarin has that covered; but that's not why it was acquired. Xamarin is popular in the developer community (the company counts over 1.1M active developers in its community) as it offers a seamless experience for writing C# code that can be re-used across the iOS, Android, and Windows 10 platforms.

Xamarin Synergies Well Known

"Xamarin enables our entire developer ecosystem to extend their skills and build apps for all modern device platforms … We are very happy to be working closely with Xamarin to ensure that developers targeting any platform can do so with Visual Studio and C#."

Mitra Azizirad | GM of Developer Tools Marketing & Sales, Microsoft | May, 2014

Integrating Xamarin into its existing application development portfolio will be trivial for Microsoft (much of the company’s code base is open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET programming language). Microsoft should leverage Xamarin's strength as an enterprise-grade mobile application platform―IBM, Oracle, SAP and VMware each have robust backend integration capabilities. While this acquisition was a long time coming, tools like Xamarin provide hope for Windows 10 Mobile loyalists. For enterprise customers, Xamarin can help Microsoft migrate its customers to the cloud and help to streamline and standardize their mobile app development in C#, share source code amongst platforms, while leveraging their existing skills, teams, tools and code to deliver apps with broad reach.  Going forward, Microsoft's "appnostic" pitch to enterprise developers can be a simple one, we have the application development tools to help simplify the development of your enterprise-grade mobile applications.

View the 2017 Enterprise Mobility & Connected Devices Research Outline to learn more.