Mobilize.net, led by two long-time Microsoft execs, aims to bring thousands of legacy .NET applications to the mobile devices or cloud platform of the customer’s choice.
While many in the Web 2.0 and mobile device world dominated by iOS and Android don’t see Windows and .NET as the platforms of the future, millions of people are running those applications in thousands of businesses. That is not a constituency to ignore.
Bellevue, Wash.-based Mobilize.net, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Artinsoft led by CEO Tom Button, who was formerly corporate VP of Microsoft’s developer tools division. DeeDee Walsh, who just stepped down as director of business development for that Microsoft division, is now VP of marketing and business development for Mobilize.net. The company will use Artinsoft technology to bring older .NET applications to the Microsoft Azure or any cloud and to mobile devices as required by customers.
“We have an offering now for Azure via Artinsoft, but if customers want to put their .NET applications on Amazon Web Services, heck yeah, we’ll do that,” Walsh said in an interview.
Artinsoft, based in San Jose, Costa Rica, has a long history with Microsoft. When the company revamped its Visual Studio tool set from 6.0 to .NET, it broke a lot of compatibility. Artinsoft provided the best conversion tools to bring those older applications to .NET, Walsh said. Microsoft included Artinsoft’s tools in the Visual Studio box. “They were great at moving VS 6.0 appiations to .NET but that was not a growing market. Moving all these .net applications to the cloud and to mobile devices is huge,” Walsh said.
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Windows applications, which still dominate on laptop and desktop PCs but lag on mobile devices, are getting a lot of attention now. Popular open-source oriented configuration management tools from Opscode and Puppet Labs (see disclosure) are adding more Windows and .NET support. And Github, long the collaborative software versioning tool and repository of choice for open-source types, just added its first native Windows interface to make it easier for windows developers to use the product. And Amazon just added .NET support to its Elastic Beanstalk.
Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.
Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user AdamSelwood
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