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Pivotal pivots with Xtreme Labs acquisition

Sons of VMware remember mobile devices, buy consulting firm

VMware's cloudy spinoff Pivotal has acquired mobile development and consulting company Xtreme Labs for a reported $65m.

The acquisition of the Canadian mobile development company was announced on Wednesday by Pivotal, and will see Xtreme Labs merged into Pivotal's large development organization.

"Today's acquisition further aligns with Pivotal's strategy to capitalize on the nexus of converging forces in the industry," Pivotal wrote in a statement.

Pivotal was formed in April 1st of 2013 as a private company owned by EMC, General Electric, and VMware. Its aims are to create a platform-as-a-service out of a dizzying sack of technologies ranging from its own Hadoop distribution to the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service to RabbitMQ to the Spring application development framework.

While the rest of the technology industry is busily trying to design general purpose software stacks to cater for broad problems, such as the OpenStack cloud platform, Pivotal is going in the opposite direction by creating a gigantic platform cloud that can be tweaked and amputated until it fits the specific needs (and budget) of a client.

Clearly, the company needs to be able to offer mobile front-end services as well, and it's likely that reason which motivated it to buy Toronto-based Xtreme Labs, which has been doing mobile apps on a per-contract basis for six years for clients like Facebook, Twitter, American Express, BlackBerry, Match.com and Mercedes-Benz.

"By joining forces with one of the most well-funded, well-connected "startups" in Silicon Valley and with financial support from major players like EMC, VMWare and GE, we can effectively deliver the best of Big Data, PaaS, Infrastructure, Cloud and of course, Mobile Services," Xtreme Labs wrote in a statement.

"This is not an end, but a start to a much bigger and better mobile world. We are excited about the next chapter for Xtreme Labs and the opportunity that lies ahead for us as a part of Pivotal."

"Sources close to the situation" told AllThingsD that Pivotal had paid $65m for Xtreme Labs. ®

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