Visto CMO Doug Brackbill has shrugged off suggestions that Visto's acquisition of Good Technology from Motorola lacks strategic sense, insisting that Good plugs a hole in Visto's product portfolio.
Brackbill said that Good's client base of large enterprise, government and multi-national customers complemented Visto's focus, through its operator partners, on the prosumer, SoHo and SME market. He also said that the US reach of Good provided a geographic reach. Added to that, Good operates not just PIM and Email mobile services, but provides mobilisation of behind the firewall enterprise applications.
Visto would be able to increase the range of devices and platforms that Good supports, Brackbill added, once the company goes about integrating the technologies.
But others remain to be convinced. Synchronica's CEO, Carsten Brinkschulte, said, "Good is a completely proprietary system which has substantial overlap with the existing Visto solution. From a technical perspective, I don't see many synergies, just a lot of overlap.
Integrating two proprietary mobile email systems into a single platform will be a technical nightmare. And if Visto continues to support Good as a separate product, where is the synergy other than additional revenue and cost? We also have to assume that Good was not profitable because why else would Motorola have dumped Good?".
And Jeremy Green, mobile director at advisory and consulting firm Ovum, added, "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."
Brackbill countered that argument by saying that because Visto and Good are both provided as a service from separate Network Operating Centres (NOCs), the company can run both services in parallel "from day one", supporting both platforms – but he said "it would look like a seamless product line to the end user". In time, he said, integration could take place at the client and then platform level – adding Visto's device support to Good's enterprise solutions.
With Nokia jettisoning its behind the firewall enterprise solutions, operators were faced with a dominant RIM, or working with Windows Mobile for MS Exchange users. Visto hopes it will provide another credible option for operators in the enterprise space.
"This deal positions us very well against RIM," Brackbill said, "adding our device support to all the best features of Good's mobile VPN, such as its top level security."
But Ross Bott, SEVEN's President and CEO, said that he thought the action had moved to the retail space.
"We believe the market for mobile messaging has rapidly shifted towards the retail market with the introduction of powerful messaging-centric yet affordable devices that blur the line between enterprise and end-user adoption. This is where the action is."
When the deal closes, and Brackbill refused to disclose any terms at all, although it is known Motorola paid $400 million for Good in 2006, the outstanding litigation between Visto and Good will be closed.