Partners Cheer BlackBerry's $425 Million Blockbuster Acquisition Of Good Technology

BlackBerry on Friday revealed it will acquire mobile device management and security company Good Technology in a $425 million effort to expand its cross-platform enterprise mobility management portfolio.

Partners applauded the acquisition as an opportunity for BlackBerry to turn around its declining revenue through expanding its portfolio of EMM solutions across multiple operating systems and mobile devices.

"I am excited about BlackBerry buying Good," said Robby Hill, founder and CEO of HillSouth, a Florence, S.C.-based Microsoft partner. "This continues to show BlackBerry is executing on its long-term strategy to be operating-system agnostic and be less reliable on any one hardware and software platform. From a partner perspective, we should see new business opportunities by leveraging Good's brand name and, hopefully soon, new products."

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Good Technology, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company, provides solutions like app-level encryption, advanced data loss prevention and secure communication between applications, as well as management for Android, Android Wear, Apple Watch, BlackBerry, iOS and Windows Phone.

Good has expertise in multioperating system management. Up to 64 percent of Good's activations are from iOS devices, and the company has a broad Android and Windows customer base as well.

Through the acquisition, BlackBerry said it will be able to expand its BlackBerry 10 OS and Android management to global enterprise and government customers.

Both BlackBerry and Good Technology have channel partner programs. A spokesperson at Good Technology did not respond to a question by press time about how Good's channel partner ecosystem would be influenced by the acquisition.

"The biggest benefit of this acquisition for BlackBerry is that it introduces pure multi-OS capability and moves BlackBerry from a niche market player with declining revenues to an organization that can now market cross-platform EMM to companies of all sizes," said Jay Gordon, vice president of sales at Plano, Texas-based BlackBerry partner Enterprise Mobile. "While Good has not fared as well as other MDM providers in recent years, it has shared a focus with legacy BlackBerry shops primarily in financial services, health care and government."

CEO John Chen, on a conference call with investors, said the transaction was expected to close in the third quarter of 2016, and stressed BlackBerry's goal of expanding its solutions across multiple operating systems and platforms.

"Our vision at BlackBerry is more secure, connected technology for the world," said Chen. "Good brings us platform diversity and expansion. We're very comfortable with ... how our focus with Good is the same."

Good Technology is the latest in BlackBerry's string of acquisitions. In April, the Waterloo, Ontario-based company bought WatchDox, a file security and secure document gateway company. In December, it acquired Secusmart, a German company specializing in voice and data encryption.

BlackBerry has been struggling to stabilize its weak revenue through acquiring smaller companies and beefing up its product portfolios across multiple operating systems.The company reported a revenue drop of $660 million in the fourth quarter from last year's $976 million in the same quarter, in March. Analysts had projected revenue of $786 million.

Rick Jordan, director of mobility sales at Tenet Computer Group, a Toronto-based BlackBerry partner, thinks the acquisition will help accelerate BlackBerry's turnaround in the mobile security space.

"This is going to strengthen BlackBerry's foothold in the enterprise," said Jordan. "With Good, it will be more complementary technology, and now it gives them an elevated platform."

PUBLISHED SEPT. 4, 2015