The story
Good Technology in its current form is a continuation of two previous companies. One was Visto, founded in 1996 (and initially known as Roampage). Visto acquired the original Good Technology in 2009, and assumed its name. The original Good Technology had been founded in 2000; it was initially known as SpringThings, and sold an MP3 player for the Handspring Visor before shifting to email products for mobile professionals.
Prior to the acquisition, both companies marketed email access from portable devices. In November 2006, Motorola announced plans to acquire Good Technology as part of its plan to compete with Research in Motion's BlackBerry product line in the enterprise sector, and expressed its intention to continue licensing its technology to other phone manufacturers. At the time of the acquisition, Good's flagship products were Good Mobile Messaging, Good Mobile Intranet and Good Mobile Defense; the company had 470 employees.
On February 23, 2009, Motorola announced that it had agreed to sell Good Technology to rival push email provider, Visto. In 2009 Visto announced that it had renamed itself Good Technology effectively taking the name of the former independent company.
From 2009 to 2012, Good Technology grew through acquisitions, among them Intercasting Corporation (May 2009) and CloudSync (January 2010), Copiun (2012), and AppCentral (2012).
In December 2009 Good Technology began supporting iPhone and Android devices. The company launched Good Dynamics, a set of mobile application development tools for enterprise and consumers, in October 2011.
With the Good Secure Mobility Solution, released in June 2013, Good Technology aimed to address real-world usage in which professionals use several apps to accomplish a task. Building on its app containerization approach and the Good Dynamics platform, the company presented a system that was both secure and responsive to customers’ usage habits.
In September 2013 the company's "Good for Enterprise (GFE)" solution became the first cross-platform mobile collaboration solution to achieve Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4 Augmented (EAL4+) and the only containerized solution to meet this level of security certification on either iOS or Android.
In February 2014, Good Technology acquired BoxTone for its Mobile Device Management, Enterprise Mobility Management, Mobile Service Management and Mobile App Performance Monitoring Solutions.
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On September 4, 2015 BlackBerry announced that it would acquire Good Technology for $425 Million dollars. The news of the acquisition was confirmed by Good Technology CEO Christy Wyatt in a blog post on the Good Blog. The acquisition was completed on November 2, 2015. The fire sale was controversial because Good Technology was valued at $1 billion and had filed for an IPO in May 2014, and in early 2015 the company's board had turned down an all-cash offer of $800 million. The valuation of Good Technology has been suggested to be inflated, and though the company reported 2014 revenue of $211.9 million compared to 2013 revenue of $160.4 million, with a 2014 operating loss of $83.9 million loss compared to the 2013 and 2012 operating losses of $115.9 million and $89.4 million, the 2014 filing showed the company had $42.1 million which was less than 12 months worth, and that cash had dwindled to under $25 million by the start of 2015. The employees' common stock at the time of the acquisition by BlackBerry was worth only 44 cents per share (around 10 percent of what it had been the previous year) while preferred stock for executives and venture capitalists was $3 per share; furthermore employees had been taxed on the common share value when it reached its peak (as they were leaving the company).
In late 2016 Sunnyvale headquarters office was closed, all remaining employees were moved to the BlackBerry office located in Mountain View.
In 2017 all Good Technology products were rebranded under the BlackBerry Software brand.
From Wikipedia’s article on Good Technology, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5