Developer makes software to manage delivery and billing of content accessed through handsets.
Sun Microsystems, in a move to meet the growing demand for data delivered to mobile devices, Thursday said it plans to buy Pixo Inc., a privately held maker of Java-based software that manages the development, delivery, and billing of content accessed through handsets. Although Sun already offers Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition, for delivering apps to mobile devices and the Solaris operating system and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition, for the back end, Pixo lets Sun offer the full spectrum of mobile content delivery, says Eric Chu, director of the J2ME platform for Sun"s software systems group.
Pixo software will become part of the Project Orion platform, which combines Sun"s software offerings into a predictable, scheduled quarterly release of an integrated software system distributed on Solaris operating system, Solaris x86 Platform Edition, and Linux. Pixo"s clients include Bell Canada and European mobile application infrastructure provider End2End.
Sun also sees Pixo"s technology as playing a critical role in mobile computing in the workplace. The software will provide a centralized way of managing how data is distributed to mobile devices throughout a company, determining which users have access to certain applications and what user privileges they have, Chu says.