IBM will make NodeJS platform a standard for enterprise development

Yesterday, IBM officially announced the acquisition of StrongLoop , which has been providing NodeJS professional support to corporate customers since 2013.

StrongLoop is one of the leaders in the enterprise NodeJS sector. Customers pay for a StrongLoop Suite product subscription and receive a set of tools for convenient application development using software interfaces to the cloud backend, debugging, monitoring, etc.

StrongLoop is known as one of the most active participants in the NodeJS project, it constantly sends patches to implement new features and improve popular platform.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But it is known that StrongLoop received $ 9 million in venture financing . Probably the purchase amount exceeds $ 10 million.

What did IBM pay that kind of money for?

The development of NodeJS shows that this young technology is already ripe for serious corporate use. Literally two days ago , version 4.0.0 was released , into which Io.js code merged, Node Foundation was formed, stable releases were announced twice a year, and the release of Node LTS version with long-term support.

In such circumstances, IBM considers it necessary to integrate NodeJS features in its line of software products for developing enterprise applications both in the cloud and within the enterprise. Here, NodeJS will complement MobileFirst and WebSphere, allowing you to build scalable software interfaces and more easily integrate the existing backend, corporate processes and front-end on mobile devices, in the Internet of things and web applications of an open, hybrid cloud. NodeJS is one of the technologies that are best suited for such tasks.

The NodeJS community will have undeniable benefits through this deal: from now on, it will have direct access to many services from IBM and third-party companies, including analytics and Watson .

StrongLoop representatives themselves are confident that the deal is beneficial not only for them, but for the entire open-source community. “With this acquisition, the entire industry will benefit from NodeJS becoming a formal enterprise mainstream,” said Juan Carlos Soto, CEO of StrongLoop. On a corporate blog, he explains in detail that much will change for the better now that they are part of IBM.

IBM shares StrongLoop's vision for the future of Node, and IBM is also a recognized leader in enterprise software development as well as open-source . IBM is also a founding sponsor of the Node Foundation.. Three of the fifteen members of the Node Foundation technical steering committee are IBM employees.

IBM has been working closely with StrongLoop and the Node community for over a year, and within the company more than 20 developers are directly involved in creating enterprise development solutions on Node, and three of them work as Node core maintainers.

StrongLoop software will continue to be open source distributed as before. It will be integrated at the same time into Bluemix, MobileFirst and WebSphere.

With IBM resources, StrongLoop will be able to accelerate the development of new versions and further increase its benefit to the community, from finalizing the overall Node core to improving its own frameworks.