With Good acquisition, Visto aims at mobile enterprises

Now that mobile email and synchronization company Visto has acquired competitor Good Technologies from Motorola, it plans to compete with BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion to win over large corporations as customers, chief executive Brian Bogosian told me earlier today.

The deal will bring some big changes to the Redwood City, Calif. company, doubling its size to more than 400 workers. The terms weren’t disclosed, but it’s worth noting that Motorola bought Good for more than $400 million two years ago.

Visto allows mobile carriers to provide email, social network integration, and more. When the deal was announced last night, we wondered how the company hopes to make money by acquiring a competitor. The difference, Bogosian said, is that while Visto has made inroads in the consumer, “prosumer,” and small-to-medium business market, Good has seen similar success among big, “enterprise-level” companies.

“I think you’ll see a single, unified strategy and approach [after the acquisition],” Bogosian said. “When you look at Good and at Visto, we push and synchronize all types of data. This will continue to be the essence what this company has been about.”

My editor Matt Marshall has given Visto a hard time in the past, mainly for its repeated, failed attempts to go public after raising more than $350 million in venture capital — he even dubbed it “Silicon Valley’s most controversial company.” But Bogosian says Visto has hit profitability, and will continue to be profitable. He also points out that Visto hasn’t raised any venture money in the past two years.

I asked Bogosian if he sees any need to change to Visto’s model, where it works through the mobile network carriers, since so much of the current excitement in the mobile market involves the iPhone App Store andGoogle’s Android Market, with others in the works. He said it’s something Visto is looking at, but there are no big changes in the works.

“I fully expect that we will take advantage of market opportunities as they present themselves … but we still expect mobile operators to be a primary channel to market for us,” he said.

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