Data integration giant Tibco Software Inc. is boosting its edge computing strategy with the acquisition of Nanoscale Inc., a provider of productivity tools for creating microservices, small pieces of software code that can be combined into various applications.

Pricing wasn’t disclosed. Tibco said the Reston, Virginia-based company’s technology will help it extend its Connected Intelligence data consolidation and analytics platform to a broader range of networks that incorporate edge computing.

Nanoscale’s platform speeds microservices development by consolidating workflow, testing, administration and shared libraries with a variety of endpoint plugins for target environments such as HTTP servers and databases. The company says developers can mix and match any combination of programming languages.

Notably, the platform speeds the creation of application programming interfaces, which permit microservices to be orchestrated. Services can then be quickly deployed to almost any environment – including Linux, ARM, Windows and MacOS – on-premises, on mobile devices, in the cloud or on an edge device, the company said.

It’s the edge component that appeared to interest Tibco most. Edge computing distributes intelligence to devices at the far reaches of a network in order to speed up processing and reduce traffic back and forth to a host. “Edge architecture requires the ability to mix and match a lot of different technologies and to easily and quickly modify these connection points to respond to changes in the business,” Ed Julson, senior product marketing manager at Tibco, wrote in a blog post announcing the purchase. “Nanoscale.io seems to have internalized these concepts very well in the way they’ve developed their tooling.”

Tibco also said the integration of Nanoscale will enable customers to better take advantage of the new style of serverless computing and function as a service, a related concept that enables individual pieces of logic to be executed without reliance upon a server. “These technologies can significantly reduce operational costs, especially in edge and IoT applications, where more processing takes place on the local device, with a more efficient utilization of microservices,” Tibco said in a statement.

Little information is available about Nanoscale, but in an interview with The New Stack last fall, Chief Product Officer Richard Mendis outlined how the company is aiming to fill a gap in microservices middleware by building “a microservices architecture that is platform-agnostic, so that developers can still use any [integrated development environment] or set of deployment tools they like.”

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