Today we announced that StrongLoop has been acquired by IBM. For information on the “why and what” this means for StrongLoop and IBM product plans, and what this means for StrongLoop customers and partners, please read Juan Carlos’ blog. IBM has identified Node.js as an important part of the future of enterprise middleware and StrongLoop’s technology and expertise as pivotal to their strategy to help companies fully unlock the value of their existing IT investments and legacy data with APIs.

What does this mean for StrongLoop’s involvement in the Node community including the open source contributions we make to Node, io.js, libuv, Express, LoopBack, Strong-PM, node-inspector, strong-oracle, and other modules or our involvement with many local meetups, conferences, online communities and the Node Foundation?

TL;DR

We expect to continue exactly as we have in the past, only with the benefit of increased resource commitments. More specifically, we’ll be continuing to increase our investment in the overall Node ecosystem faster than we could as a startup. From strengthening Node core, to improving the frameworks we steward, to making our commercial offerings more feature rich and robust, we’re excited about what we can do as leaders of IBM’s Node strategy. How can we be sure?

From the very first day when Jerry Cuomo, IBM’s CTO for Middleware, sought us out because members of his team were using LoopBack and other open source from StrongLoop, to the day when he met me and asked if we’d consider joining IBM, to all the discussions throughout the past months about how to work together, all of the leadership at IBM and everyone else have been very clear: We want you to continue to work in the community the way you have been, and to do even more by leveraging our resources.

We’ve already been working with IBMers in the community for over a year now. Here’s some highlights…

Forming the Node Foundation together

IBM has three TSC members in the Node Foundation

IBM has over 20 developers working on delivering Enterprise-grade Node with three dedicated to being Node core maintainers and they have sponsored many community events such as Node Summit, Nodeconf EU, and a variety local meetups

Conducting Node workshops using their BlueMix Garage spaces in various cities

Making sure that Node.js is a first class citizen on Softlayer and BlueMix

IBM had expressed their commitment to Node.js in meaningful ways well before now. No other major enterprise software vendor (or for that matter, no other vendor period) can claim they’ve made more of a visible commitment to the Node.js community and ecosystem over the last year than IBM – except perhaps StrongLoop.

And it’s not just Node.js. Maybe you haven’t looked at what IBM is doing with open source lately. I was surprised when I dug in. For example, did you know they are leading contributors to:

Linux

OpenStack

Cloud Foundry

Docker

Plus many Apache projects like Spark, Cordova and Hadoop

And of course, Node

IBM knows how to do open source and we plan to continue our contributions and make good on their commitment to increase our efforts together. We are in great company!

IBM & StrongLoop: Enterprise-grade Node

Node and the Node ecosystem are an amazing platform on which to build modern applications. In particular, Node is well suited for the backend APIs that power mobile and IoT applications, plus single-page web applications.

Since the very first day of StrongLoop’s founding, one of our goals has been to improve the robustness of the platform; to smooth the rough edges, offer well-tested paths to success, to improve the developer tools and runtime capabilities so that Node-based APIs could run easily at top quality in world-class deployments. We have come a long way – from a day when Node was only run in production at scale by a handful of Silicon Valley companies who all employed community maintainers, to a time when major banks, insurance companies, government agencies and retailers among others throughout the world have production deployments of Node-based APIs processing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second that are mission critical to their business.

There is so much work left to still do, and now we will have the resources to continue our part in making these improvements. Think of what we can accomplish from here! We are excited to join with IBM to continue this mission and be able to leverage the resources of the vast ecosystem they bring. This is the company that won Jeopardy and beat chess masters with machine learning that operates one of the largest cloud platforms, that still employs researchers and stays grounded in the hardware that helped bring Java from a dancing character in the browser to dominance as the enterprise server platform.

So, the next time a friend, coworker, client, analyst or boss asks, “are you sure we can use Node?” you have one more answer to add to your list: IBM is betting big on it too!

This is a new chapter for StrongLoop, for Node, for our community. Let’s get started!