Motorola says goodbye to Good Technology

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 25 February 2009 01:36

IT Industry - Market

Back in 2006 within the space of a few weeks Nokia bought mobile email specialist Intellisync to combat the growing threat from RIM's Blackberry and Motorola followed suite weeks later with the acquisition of Good Technology. In September 2008 Nokia abandoned its in-house enterprise email activities (see below) and now Motorola has again gone down the same track with plans to sell Good Technology to Visto.

Visto, which bills itself as a leading mobile push and synchronization platform for service providers, says "This [planned] acquisition immediately positions Visto as a global leader in the delivery of a full range of secure, mobile messaging solutions for enterprises through mobile operators and OEM handset manufacturers." Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Visto CEO, Brian A Bogosian, said: "As a result of this transaction, Visto will now provide customers in over 100 countries an open, robust and secure mobile experience for enterprise customers, on over 400 different mobile devices...The addition of Good's extensive service offerings in the US Europe and Asia will enable Visto to provide its government and enterprise customers with the benefits of a broader range of solutions and best-in-class secure mobile offerings."

Good Technology specialises in offering wireless messaging, mobile VPN data access, device management and handheld security for enterprise customers worldwide. Visto claims to have extensive relationships with mobile operators throughout Europe, North America, and Asia.

Good, through its relationships with US mobile carriers, claims implementations with thousands of enterprises, including many of the Fortune 500 with a high concentration of the Fortune 50.

Gene Delaney, Motorola's president, enterprise mobility solutions, Motorola, said that divesting Good Technology would "allow Motorola to continue to concentrate on providing best-in-class business-critical applications, secure management platforms and mobility services that empower the individual with the right information at the right time to streamline business processes and improve results."

Nokia tapped Cisco & Microsoft for email
Unlike Motorola, Nokia did not divest Intellisync as an entity. Instead, it announced partnerships with Cisco and Microsoft to provide push email and other mobility applications to enterprise customers and said that the technologies and expertise underpinning these activities, acquired with Intellisync, would be reallocated to supporting a new focus on consumer push email services The first fruit of this strategy was Nokia's Ovi service targeting first-time email users, and a messaging service which enables the user to combine many different emails into a cellphone.