Motorola to buy BlackBerry's main rival: Good Technology

Stuart Corner
Friday, 10 November 2006 23:41

IT Industry - Deals

In a move that mimics Nokia's acquisition earlier this year of Intellisync,  Motorola is to acquire push email service provider Good Technology, a direct competitor To Research in Motion and the BlackBerry.

Motorola said the acquisition of privately held Good Technology, based in Santa Clara, would be "a strategic addition to Motorola's Mobile Devices business...[which] will extend Motorola's mobile computing capabilities and increase the company's enterprise client base."

Good Technology's software and service offerings have been chosen by more than 12,000 enterprises around the world, and, according to Motorola, "Good Technology's highly reliable, secure connectivity platform offers the potential to power applications beyond email while extending to customers beyond the enterprise."

Good Technology provides push email delivery and synchronisation of all Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino functions, including e-mail, calendar and contacts. It can also be offered by organisations that offer a hosted Microsoft Exchange service. Telstra announced in July  that it would offer Good's services on its mobile networks.

The service operates in very similar fashion to Research In Motion's BlackBerry: there is a server in the customer's data centre that interfaces to corporate email and contact management systems. This routes messages over the Internet to servers in Good's facility in the US from they are routed onto the mobile network of the service provider for delivery to the end user device. A management interface provides for remote monitoring and control of the handset by the customers' IT department.  However unlike RIM's primary offering, it does not required a dedicated custom-built handset

The Good and BlackBerry services are closely comparable when the BlackBerry service is delivered to a BlackBerry handheld, and although RIM also offers BlackBerry software to run on a range of other devices, Good claims that it lacks the full functionality of the BlackBerry handheld. "It is not an enterprise class offering. It does not have the same set of functionality as the BlackBerry handheld. It is a really dumbed-down version. It does not do over the air management and there is no contact synchronisation," Terry Austin, Good Technology's president, worldwide sales and marketing, told iTWire earlier this year.

The Good Mobility Suite comprises three distinct applications: Good Mobile Messaging, Good Mobile Intranet and Good Mobile Defense. Good Mobile Intranet provides two-way wireless synchronisation of email, calendar, contacts, notes/journals, tasks/to-dos. Good Mobile Intranet provides access to corporate applications that have a web browser interface. Good Mobile Defense provides security for information stored on the handset in the form of encryption (transmitted data is encrypted in all modules), remote handset lockdown and remote handset application control.

Motorola has an existing business relationship: it uses Good Mobile Messaging on the Motorola Q. The acquisition is expected to close in early 2007.