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Cross-platform mobile development provider Xamarin extended its relationship with enterprise players by announcing a partnership with Oracle.
Xamarin and Oracle announced an integrated solution to enable millions of developers to build fully native, scalable, cross-platform mobile apps for enterprises. Xamarin SDK for Oracle Mobile Cloud Service enables enterprises to create mobile solutions for iOS, Android, and Windows, with secure data integration and management.
This new SDK, together with Oracle Mobile Cloud Service, a Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS), represents a transformation in making enterprise mobility simple and easy, the companies said.
“Enterprises in every industry are using mobile to transform their internal business processes and their relationships with their customers,” says Nat Friedman, CEO and co-founder of Xamarin, in a statement. “Through our collaboration with Oracle, significantly more companies can create high-performance, native mobile apps and easily connect them to their backend systems.”
Xamarin officials said enterprise mobile apps require a consumer-grade frontend and an enterprise-grade secure connected backend. The combination of the Xamarin Platform with Oracle Mobile Cloud Service makes this possible. Enterprises can create fully native iOS, Android, and Windows apps in shared code with Xamarin. With just a few lines of code, developers can connect their Xamarin apps to the Oracle Mobile Cloud Service for robust backend access, including enterprise security, push notifications, authentication, backend integrations, data storage, diagnostics, and analytics.
Enterprises can then continuously test and monitor their apps to help ensure quality, performance and rapid iteration through a combination of Xamarin Test Cloud, Xamarin Insights, and Oracle Mobile Cloud’s analytics capabilities. This results in apps with the high quality user experience, security and scalability, according to the companies.
IT research firm Gartner predicts that by 2017, mobile apps will be downloaded more than 268 billion times and that mobile users will provide personalized data streams to more than 100 apps and services every day. Xamarin and Oracle will help businesses take advantage of this opportunity by providing enterprise customers and their employees with an integrated end-to-end mobile solution including a native frontend, and a secure, enterprise-grade mobile backend.
“With Oracle’s leadership in integration and Xamarin’s success in mobile application development, millions of C# developers can now easily integrate mobile applications with enterprise systems by using Oracle Mobile Cloud Service,” says Chris Tonas, vice president of Mobility and Development Tools at Oracle, in a statement. “Together, we accelerate mobile success for our joint customers.”
With this partnership Xamarin gets access to bigger enterprise players and combines its front-end with Oracle’s secure back-end. Oracle gets access to a massive pool of developers, bringing together C# and Java for major mobile developer real estate and provides enterprise customers with quality apps. Overall, the general mobile ecosystem continues to grow and becomes more open. There are about six million C# developers and Xamarin boasts a community of more than one million developers.
The cloud war among tech giants places a high value on mobile, which is a critical medium to access cloud tools. Xamarin’s gateway to developers is coveted by enterprise players such as Oracle with its 120,000 Oracle Fusion Middleware customers.
Adding Oracle support to its repertoire brings another enterprise player into the Xamarin fold. Xamarin has long been closely aligned with Microsoft, supporting the software giant’s tool offerings and even being the subject of acquisition rumors in the past. Xamarin also has aligned itself with IBM in support of the IBM MobileFirst platform.
In May, Xamarin and IBM announced new interoperability between the Xamarin cross-platform mobile development environment and IBM’s MobileFirst portfolio that enables enterprise developers to build more secure mobile applications.
In essence, Xamarin announced interoperability with IBM MobileFirst Protect to enable enterprises to more securely deploy, manage and monitor business applications. IBM MobileFirst Protect, formerly IBM MaaS360, is a secure enterprise mobility management platform that provides mobility management and security of mobile devices, applications, documents, emails, and access to the Web from a single portal.
IBM and Xamarin initiated their partnership around MobileFirst last October. The combination of Xamarin and now IBM MobileFirst Protect, IBM’s Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution, enables developers to use the Xamarin platform to build iOS, Android and Windows apps using shared C# code. The interoperability also enables rapid user provisioning, access and continued app lifecycle management from cloud provisioned services.