Good Technology acquires Intercasting to better challenge Blackberry

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 28 May 2009 08:57

IT Industry - Strategy

Good Technology, a provider of 'push' mobility technologies and a rival to Research in Motion's BlackBerry, has acquired Intercasting Corporation to extend its reach beyond smartphones and into the much larger feature phone market.

The move is the latest chapter in a multiyear saga of acquisitions and divestitures as handset makers, especially Nokia and Motorola, have struggled to catch up with RIM's pioneering push technology for handhelds.

Good Technology is the new name for Visto Corporation which earlier this year bought Good Technology from Motorola. Good claims that its patented underlying technology is "the cornerstone of the enterprise and consumer mobile email industry, offering the most versatile and open real-time synchronisation platform for a broad range of applications, including innovative collaboration and social networking solutions." It says that Intercasting's technology and Intercasting's "Anthem platform, coupled with Good's 'Good for You' solution, "enables Good to extend its reach beyond the smartphone market and into the billion-plus feature phone market."

According to Good Technology, "Intercasting brings together an entire communication ecosystem comprised of social networks, email services, instant messaging providers, content providers, application developers, mobile operators, and device manufacturers. The result is an advanced communication service platform that delivers the highest-quality communication experience to mobile users.

The flexibility of the Anthem technology means in-demand services like email, IM, and social networking can now be integrated into native device functionality, enabling next-generation services such as network address books, app stores, and integration into an active user interface."

Intercasting's functionality is provided 'in the cloud' and Good says it is used by all tier one US. Intercasting was founded in 2004 and the first company to deploy a carrier-grade mobile blogging and social networking application in North America with Rabble (www.rabble.com).

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, as did Motorola in early 2009 by selling Good Technology to Visto, a company which billed itself as " a leading mobile push and synchronisation platform for service providers."

Visto said the acquisition of good would position it 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." Amidst this turmoil among competitors, Research in Motion, meanwhile, has gone from strength to strength with an every increasing range of handsets designed to expand the market for BlackBerry technology from its original market, primarily senior executives in large corporates.