IBM will make the NodeJS platform corporate standard

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

StrongLoop is one of the leaders in the corporate NodeJS sector. Customers pay a subscription to the StrongLoop Suite product and get 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, she constantly sends patches to implement new features and improve the popular platform.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. But it is known that StrongLoop received $ 9 million in venture financing . Probably the amount of the purchase exceeds $ 10 million.
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What did IBM pay for that kind of money?

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

In such circumstances, IBM considers it necessary to integrate the functions of NodeJS into 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 simply combine existing backend, corporate processes and frontend on mobile devices, on 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 gain clear benefits from this deal: from now on, it will have direct access to many services from IBM and third-party companies, including analytics and Watson .

Representatives of StrongLoop are confident that the deal is beneficial not only for them, but also for the entire open-source community. “With this acquisition, the entire industry will benefit from the formal entry of NodeJS into the mainstream corporate development,” said Juan Carlos Soto, executive director of StrongLoop. In the corporate blog, he explains in detail that things will change for the better now that they are part of IBM.

IBM shares StrongLoop's views on the future of Node, and IBM is a recognized leader in both enterprise software development and open source . IBM is also one of the founding sponsors 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 more than a year, and within the company, more than 20 developers are directly involved in creating solutions for corporate development on Node, and three of them work as Node core maintainers.

The StrongLoop software will continue to be distributed with open source as before. At the same time, it will be integrated into Bluemix, MobileFirst and WebSphere.

With IBM's resources, StrongLoop will be able to accelerate the development of new versions and further increase its benefits to the community, from refining the common Node core to improving our own frameworks.