BlackBerry just struck a deal with the California-based Good Technology and will now be merging its mobile services into the already extensive enterprise suite. $425 million were apparently enough to snatch the mobile business, which has been an IPO candidate for quite some time now.
The deal is actually quite good and here is why. Good Technology is far from a household name, but it is a popular vendor of secure cross-platform mobile management solutions. Thus, the US company is actually offering similar services to BlackBerry’s enterprise suits, but with a cross-platform approach or what is known as a bring-your-own-device approach. Furthermore, Good Technology has been doing fairly well on the market with more than 6,200 organizations in over 190 countries using their services of which more than 50 are on the FORTUNE 100 list.
BlackBerry’s plan is to merge its existing portfolio of enterprise services and solutions with the ones from Good Technology. This way the Canadian tech giant hopes to modernize and broaden its enterprise secure communication offers, which were once undisputed in their total market domination, but have been suffering lately due to the growing popularity of Android and iOS. To quote BlackBerry’s own statement:
BlackBerry’s leadership in MDM, application management and secure connectivity combined with Good’s leadership in mobile containers, productivity suite, service management and SDKs will create a higher-value product stack with the capability to expand well beyond EMM collaboration and application enablement
This all sounds like a terribly complicated endeavor and it most certainly is, but if everything pans out the end result should be a powerful cross-platform suite that can easily manage Android, iOS, Windows, BlackBerry devices and more, complete with more than 2000 ISV and custom apps that Good currently has trough either in-house development or in its partner program. This also means that the existing client and partnership base will be transferred to BlackBerry as well to further strengthen in enterprise branch.
[“source-gsmarena”]
