Ovum Analysis --

Visto acquires Good Technology from Motorola

Jeremy Green, Mobile Director, Ovum

• White-label email application vendor Visto is to buy Good Technology from Motorola for an undisclosed sum. The move continues the consolidation in the push email market and the trend for handset vendors to exit the enterprise applications market.

Motorola is presenting its decision as part of a strategic re-focusing, saying that it ‘will allow Motorola to continue to concentrate on providing best-in-class business-critical applications, secure management platforms and mobility services’ – a category that presumably no longer includes mobile push email. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the sale owes more to the handset vendor’s continuing troubles. Motorola has re-organised and restructured its enterprise-related activities several times in the last few years, alternately combining and separating out its non-cellular radio businesses and Wi-Fi activities with aspects of its devices and applications portfolio.

Motorola is not the only vendor to reverse its push email strategy

Motorola bought Good Technology, then a privately held company, in late 2006. As with the disposal, the amount paid was undisclosed – but a figure in the range of $450–500 million is widely cited, as is the suggestion that Motorola will be selling Good for rather less than it paid for it.

Motorola’s acquisition followed on from Nokia’s purchase, in February 2006, of Intellisync, another vendor of behind-the-firewall enterprise-oriented mobile email and applications; delightfully, this came hot on the heels of Nokia’s announcement that it had developed its own in-house behind-the-firewall solution to support enterprise push email. Then, both vendors appeared to believe that the route into what was seen as the lucrative enterprise market was to ape RIM’s approach by selling an end-to-end solution rather than merely enterprise-oriented devices.

RIM is the last man standing on the end-to-end push email field

What a difference a couple of years can make. Late last year Nokia announced that it would no longer support its Intellisync line, effectively abandoning the enterprise mobile applications market to specialist vendors and in particular accepting the eventual hegemony of Microsoft in this domain. Motorola now appears to be following suit, leaving RIM as the last man standing on the end-to-end field.

Visto says that it will take over Good’s portfolio of products and services, and believes that breaking the link with a specific hardware vendor will make these more attractive to network operator customers. But there is considerable overlap between the two product sets, and it remains to be seen whether there is a long-term future for the Good suite. On the other hand, the acquisition does clear up one of the plethora of lawsuits between the various mobile email providers; Visto’s suit against Good, first brought in early 2006, still appears to be ongoing.

Visto’s acquisition of Good Technology is expected to be completed by the end of February.

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