In an effort to enhance its secure enterprise mobility offerings, Good Technology announced on Sunday that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Columbia, Maryland-based BoxTone, another provider enterprise mobile management solutions.
According to Good, BoxTone’s mobility management platform will be integrated into Good’s offerings to help enterprises “confidently build, deploy, support and manage mobility at scale.”
Good and BoxTone have been partners since 2012, and while some product offerings overlap, Good Technology’s top executive says BoxTone’s mobile service management is what really excites the company about the deal.
“The [Mobile Device Management] market is cluttered and very commoditized, but the mobile service management space is actually very unique,” Christy Wyatt, President and CEO of Good Technology, told SecurityWeek in an interview Sunday.
“Mobility, for a long time was kind of an island,” she said. “You have all of your service level agreements for all of your mission critical applications—then you have mobile.”
“It’s critical that mobile gets the same quality of service as every other screen in the enterprise,” said Wyatt, who previously served as Global Head of Citi’s Consumer eBusiness and Mobile Technology and as Senior Vice President and General Manager for Motorola Mobility’s Enterprise Business Unit.
“The great news about this transaction, as opposed to many M&A opportunities, is that much of the integration work is already behind us,” Wyatt said. “The teams have been working on using a common console and having our technology shared with one and other.”
For Good’s customers, Wyatt says the combination will help its customers reduce the total coast of ownership by helping companies understand what devices they have, where they are being used, and optimizing policies to drive costs down.
Good Technology isn’t the only enterprise mobile solutions firm that recognized the importance of mobile service management.
Before agreeing to be acquired by virtualization giant VMware for more than $1.5 billion earlier this year, AirWatch acquired the Mobility Services Platform business from Motorola Solutions, a move designed to help the company take advantage of technology that helps customers provision, stage and manage their enterprise mobile systems.
“Enterprise mobility deployments today are mission critical as customers deploy more devices, to more users, with more applications, while IT struggles to provide a high level of security as well as deliver a quality of service and support on par with other mission critical systems,” Wyatt said.
Additionally, the acquisition will help Good expand its market share internationally, particularly in Japan where BoxTone has a strong market presence through partnerships with carriers.
All products continue to be available through the Good and BoxTone direct and reseller channels, the company said.
The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Subject to regulatory approval and other closing conditions, the acquisition is expected to be complete within the next two months.
In a separate announcement, Good announced new partnerships with distribution partner, Tech Data, and a carrier reseller, TELUS.
The alliance with Tech Data will provide more expansive international reach with a network of more than 120,000 resellers, Good said.
The company also said that TELUS and Good are partnering in Canada to support enterprise use of Android and iOS devices and BYOD programs and that TELUS will resell Good for Enterprise and the Good Collaboration Suite.
