Reports: Good laying off staff

Good Technology laid off 100 employees or a fifth of its staff in recent weeks as the increasingly competitive wireless e-mail has forced the company to revamp its workforce, according to wire reports.

Good CEO Danny Shader told the Associated Press that recent shift of focus from direct sales to enterprises of its GoodLink e-mail application to carrier sales requires that company restructure its staff to accommodate operators demands for field services.

GoodLink is client-server software technology designed to be loaded into smartphones and PDAs instead of being embedded in specialty devices like Research in Motion’s. While RIM is still the market leader, Good has made progress in the last year in capturing some of the Canadian vendor’s market share. Good claims to have 7000 corporate accounts of various sizes, but its two biggest wins of recent date were with Cingular and Sprint agreeing to support the two carriers’ budding enterprise programs. While the resale wins potentially spell a big uptake in users on the Good platform, the revenues per user would be far lower than in a direct sale to enterprise.

The push e-mail market has been very active in the last years as half a dozen vendors have pitted their new e-mail solutions against RIM’s. Some like Seven’s and Visto’s are intended for the consumer or pro-sumer markets, using basic software clients that don’t require a dedicated server. Others like Good’s and Intellisync’s not only follow RIM’s Server client model, but also provide network operations centers like RIM to manage user traffic.

The latest entry into the game, however, was Nokia, which announced on Monday that it is launching its own e-mail platform built on a Java platform.