In a move to beef up its enterprise mobile capabilities to meet a growing demand for all things mobile, IBM on Tuesday announced an agreement to acquire Worklight. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Worklight acquisition sets the stage for Big Blue to offer mobile application development, integration, security and management at higher levels.

By integrating Worklight into IBM's mobility strategy, clients can tap an open platform that aims to help hasten the delivery of existing and new mobile apps to multiple devices while also safeguarding the connections between smartphone and tablet apps in enterprise IT systems. In other words, it's all about rapid deployment and security.

"If you think about what people expect from IBM, they expect a breadth of vision and implementation," said Bob Sutor, vice president of IBM Mobile Platform. "They don't want one mobile solution. They want the full range of what you need to build apps, build them securely, communicate to the back end, and connect to the database. We found Worklight to be extremely consistent with how we view the world of mobile."

A Spending Priority

IBM has done its homework on the mobile front. In a recent IBM study of more than 3,000 global CIOs, 75 percent of respondents identified mobility solutions as one of their top spending priorities. In fact, IBM noted, for the first time ever, shipments of smartphones exceeded total PC shipments in 2011.

Worklight supports both consumer and employee-facing applications. A bank, for example, 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 whether they are using an iPhone or Android device. 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.

"With the Worklight acquisition, our solutions appeals to people who are building any type of mobile application -- Web-based applications, native applications or hybrid applications that offer the best of both worlds," Sutor said. "Our solution covers all of this. We think it's going to be very appealing for people who are visualizing their mobile app and need to know how to connect it to the back end."

Mobile-Enabling Infrastructures

Sutor believes IBM also has plenty of customers who are satisfied with their infrastructure and may not have been visualizing a mobile app. But with IBM's new mobile solutions available, he reasoned, those customers may decide to extend their assets to the mobile world to leverage capabilities like geolocation.

"Some customers have an infrastructure. So they want to leverage that. They are not looking for some little random mobile server to stick in a corner. They want it very much to extend what they have in hand already," Sutor said.

"We talk about service-oriented architecture. There is significant infrastructure that's running so many businesses around the world. How do you mobile-enable it correctly? That's what we're doing here."

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