Motorola divests Good push services to Visto

Motorola today announced that it will divest its Good Technology division to mobile push and synchronization company Visto for an undisclosed sum. The deal marks the end of the struggling handset maker’s involvement in push services and will expand Visto’s mobile messaging platform to the enterprise market, encompassing more than 100 countries and 400 different mobile devices.

Good Technology, the one-time second place provider to Research In Motion’s push email platform, was acquired by Motorola in 2006. Around this time push email competition and consolidation was heating up, and some thought that smaller vendors including Visto would never match the scale and carrier relationships of Motorola, Nokia and its now-defunct Intellisync service and even RIM, still a small company at that time.

However, also at this time, Motorola was flush with its own success, said Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst for IDC’s mobile technology and trends group. The handset manufacturer had its sights set on moving into the enterprise to compete with market leader RIM and, to some extent, Palm. But ultimately Motorola has not been able to maintain this breakneck pace, Llamas said. Under mounting financial pressures, the sale of Good will help Motorola cut costs focus on enterprise mobility and reviving its dragging handset division, leaving Visto to pursue RIM in the enterprise instead.

“Good, first and foremost, is not in [Motorola’s] core focus anymore,” Llamas said. “That is pretty evident. What Motorola is trying to do is beef up its handset experience and going after the enterprise is not a major focus anymore. For Visto, it seems like a slam dunk.”

Good specializes in offering wireless messaging, mobile VPN data access, device management and handheld security for its enterprise customer base, including Fortune 50 companies in the US, Europe and Asia. To date, Visto has been more focused on the consumer market, having formed relationships with mobile operators in the same regions. Outside of email, the platform includes mobile push synchronization for social networking and photo sharing.

With Visto’s entry into the high-end enterprise user, Chief Marketing Officer Doug Brackbill said RIM will be its primary competitor. The main competitive differentiator for Visto is that it can support its platform across many different devices, while RIM’s proprietary service is tethered to its own hardware.

“It’s a market that has a lot of upside opportunity because there is a lot of room for additional penetration in this market,” Brackbill said. “It’s growing fast, and there’s a lot of room for growth. It’s a very smart move for us to round out our product portfolio and challenge RIM in our markets.”