The record-breaking $67 billion merger between its parent company and Dell Inc. is apparently not interrupting business as usual at VMware Inc., which kicked off the European installment of its annual customer summit this morning with the announcement of a new strategic acquisition. The target of the buy should provide attendees with plenty of material for discussion between sessions.

Boxer Inc. has developed a mobile inbox that allows users to aggregate emails from their Gmail, Exchange and Outlook accounts through a centralized interface that also offers access to related services such as cloud-based file lockers and social networks in the same view. The result is what the startup bills as a one-stop hub for viewing work-relating information on mobile devices.

The app wouldn’t seem particularly out of place in the portfolio of VMware rivals such as Microsoft Corp. or even Amazon Inc., but does make the deal something of a special case for the hypervisor maker, which has traditionally focused mainly on the administrative aspect of supporting mobile workers. And it’s only been doing that since acquiring AirWatch for $1.5 billion last year.

But while Boxer may not blend with the rest of VMware’s lineup as far as its target audience is concerned, its software certainly does from a strategic point of view. After all, the mobile device and application management capabilities of AirWatch are meant not only to help administrators perform their work better but also improve the quality of the service delivered to end-users, a mission that the centralized inbox complements perfectly.

In addition to the obvious productivity benefits of enabling workers to access their business information from a unified interface, Boxer also presents an opportunity for VMware to promote its ACE mobile security standard. So much so that Noah Wasmer, the chief technology officer of the company’s end-user computing divison, hinted in the blog post announcing the deal that providing integration with the framework is one of the first items on the agenda for the app.

VMware could leverage its existing enterprise foothold to grow the adoption of Boxer to a point where providers have a substantial incentive to plug their services into the centralized inbox, integration that would necessarily have to include its ACE-powered security capabilities. And those in turn interface with AirWatch. Thus, in a future where a significant number of the apps mobile workers rely on to access business information allow for centralized policy enforcement through the security standard, CIOs would have another strong reason to choose VMware’s platform over alternatives that don’t support ACE.

Image via Boxer