Digia is opening a regional unit headquarters for its Qt Commercial arm from Helsinki, Finland to Santa Clara, California. The company signed an agreement in March of this year with Nokia to acquire the Qt commercial licensing and services business.
Through the proposed acquisition, around 3500 desktop and embedded customer companies from various industries are being transferred to Digia. The company says its new Silicon Valley office will help meet increasing demand for the commercial Qt licensing product.
Qt also continues to be offered under the GNU LGPL 2.1 license by Nokia, with the project moving towards a more open model of governance. Nokia also announced recently that Qt is central to its strategy for "bringing apps to the next billion", pointing towards a continued importance for Qt within Nokia as the company transitions from the Symbian smartphone platform to Windows Phone.
Digia's offerings include ERP systems and mobile and user experience services and solutions — Digia's Qt Commercial will now provide application developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) with the Qt cross-platform UI and application framework for creating and deploying applications to desktops and embedded platforms.
"We are excited to extend our Qt business to serve our new customers. Building on our in-depth Qt expertise and experience from demanding mission-critical solutions, we will offer world-class commercial licensing and support services to Qt Commercial customers. We also look forward to driving further the evolution of Qt by bringing in new features and services," said Harri Paani, a Digia senior VP at the time of the original transition of Qt Commercial.
Developers in regulated industries with specific documentation requirements, or developers in industries, which have restrictions on open source applications, can develop "without concern" with Qt Commercial. Digia claims that Qt Commercial is the only development framework that allows for recompilation of code to port easily from Windows to Linux to Mac.
"Our US presence is part of a large organizational shift at Digia to provide more support to the growing number of North American-based Qt Commercial development shop customers — we want to ensure they feel comfortable adopting Qt Commercial and know they've got the full support of the Digia, Qt Commercial development and services team behind them," said Tuukka Turunen, director of R&D, Digia, Qt Commercial.
"We believe there is no ceiling to the amount of success developers can achieve in utilizing Qt Commercial, which allows Qt users from the embedded and desktop space to seamlessly develop across platforms. We are solely focused on Qt development for desktop and embedded applications — in addition to expanding our work with and support of leading RTOS providers," he added.
The new U.S.-based Qt Commercial headquarters demonstrates Digia's understanding of the pressing, real-time needs of Qt Commercial users, says the company.
Digia, Qt Commercial is used by industry-leading companies such as Pitney Bowes, Navico, and Gibson Guitar Corporation to develop advanced UIs and applications. Several Hollywood movie production houses have also created their advanced 3D applications (Kung-Fu Panda to name just one) with Qt Commercial, allowing them to offer a highly advanced and customizable tool to their artists.
