At CTIA this year I somehow completely missed the fact that Visto has rebranded itself as Good after acquiring the IP and brand from Motorola.
It's amazing to me that Visto is still trundling along. Changing the name and brand makes a lot of sense given Visto's aggressive litigation, brash claims of growth which it never fulfilled, and history of burning through large amounts of VC cash.
And now they have acquired moblie social networking tools provider intercasting.
On paper this might make sense. In the real world it will further delay any real progress in the one area Visto needs to make progress: Acquiring customers for its existing operator customers. Good had a very nice client UI but the server--yikes. Integrating that technology into Visto's roadmap would take a good 1-2 years. And now to add a third layer of complexity?
This further opens the window for an upstream player, either an OS provider such as Android or a service provider concentrating on one flagship OS, to develop a complete service experience based on the mobile social address book. The startups and technology vendors trying to bring white label and third party social networking tools and integration are getting bogged down in a spaghetti code fest of features rather than focusing on defining and driving the key user stories and experiences which will define the platform. This is why Twitter exists and is exploding and creates a huge window of opportunity for the player with the resolve to focus on service experience rather than features. Who will that be?
Motorola Good opening up NOC
Motorola's Good announced a managed service VPN as part of Good 6.o, it's new product release, this summer.
The current issue of Informa Groups Mobile Messaging Analyst addresses this in an article citing Hugh Stevenson, EMEA business-development manager for Good Technology in th eMotorola Enterprise Mobility unit.
This article positions the VPN as simply a first productized offer for Motorola to use Good's NOC to launch managed services to SMB's worldwide. It's an interesting model on several points: bypasses carriers (presumably through IT channel), offers product as managed service, and changes value prop from product/application layer to service delivery (i.e. commoditizes NOC to offer as managed secure bandwidth).
It will be very interesting to see what uptake this has relative to Microsoft's play to go server-side to achieve the same things with SC MDM.
July 28, 2008 in Good Technology, Mobile Device Mgt, Mobile Email Vendor Roundup, Mobile industry commentary, Motorola | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)