Facebook is to buy app tools company Parse as it looks to generate more revenue from its sizeable developer community.

Parse is cloud-based platform that provides backend services for data storage, notifications and user management. Developers using the service therefore do not need to manage servers and complex infrastructure.

The acquisition should make it easier for developers to build mobile apps with the Facebook platform and enable these apps to span different mobile platforms and devices.

Facebook’s director of product management, Douglas Purdy, wrote on the Facebook Developers Blog that there are no plans to change the Parse products and community.

Apps supported by Parse will not be affected and will not have to use Facebook functionality. Parse will honour existing contracts.

Parse has been developed from a “rough prototype” over the past two years and now powers tens of thousands of apps for some of the world’s best brands, according to a post on its blog. Facebook and Parse have been working together for some time.

“Combining forces with a partner like Facebook makes a lot of sense. In a short amount of time, we’ve built up a core technology and a great community of developers. Bringing that to Facebook allows us to work with their incredible talent and resources to build the ideal platform for developers,” said Ilya Sukhar, CEO of Parse.

The transaction is expected to be close shortly with TechCrunch reporting that the transaction could be worth as much as $85 million.

While Facebook’s developer community is sizeable, is doesn’t currently make money from developers using its platform for apps. However, the addition of the Parse mobile backend-as-a-service could mean Facebook has a service which app developers are willing to pay for.

TechCrunch goes as far as saying that Parse could become “the plug-and-play backend of a Facebook mobile OS focused on making things easy for developers”, something supported by Facebook’s acquisition of mobile app development and in-brower preview platform Pieceable.

However, building its own OS would go against Facebook’s strategy of being a social layer on top of iOS and Android.