| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software |
| Fate | Renamed Good Technology |
| Founded | 1996 |
| Headquarters | Redwood Shores, California |
| Key people | Brian A. Bogosian, CEO & Chairman Jean Tripier, EVP & COO Antoine Blondeau, SVP & General Manager Haniff Somani, CTO |
| Products | PIM and web-based corporate connectivity software |
| Revenue | N/A |
| Employees | N/A |
| Website | www.visto.com |
Visto was a private US company located in Redwood Shores, CA. Visto sold Push e-mail products for mobile phones. The company acquired Good Technology in 2009 and renamed itself for the acquired company.
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Visto was founded as "Roampage" in 1996 by ex-Javasoft employees Chris Zuleeg, Prasad Wagle, and Hong Bui. Doug Brackbill was brought on as CEO. David Cowan was one of the initial investors. By late 1997 there were over 40 employees, and the company name was changed to Visto.
In 1996, the target customer was the mobile professional. When this user base was not expanding as fast as desired, a free Visto Beta service was opened to anyone by summer 1997, with the first "Commercial Release" in April 1998, when functionality and services above the baseline were offered for a fee. Customer growth increased, but never generated profitable revenue stream. Consumer services were terminated circa 2002, when Visto returned focus to OEM and corporate customers.
In 1998, Visto was in talks with Palm Computing, and Wireless Knowledge (a Qualcomm-Microsoft joint venture). Visto partnered with Geocities before Geocities was acquired by Yahoo.
In 2003, Visto bought push email solutions business from Psion, which was created in 2002 as a new division called Psion Software.
On February 23, 2009 Visto announced it is buying Good Technology from Motorola, Visto closed acquisition of Good Technology on March 2, 2009 and changed the Visto name to Good Technology.
In 1996, Visto offered what was likely the first complete browser-based application suite: including email, to-do list, calendar, address book, remote file storage (ftp by any other name), browser bookmarks (both IE and Netscape). Visto pioneered the sharing of calendars between customers, allowing one to send invites and coordinate events with other Visto users.
Visto also offered a then-unique push email service allowing corporate email to be accessed outside the company firewall. A Windows service was configured on a machine within the company firewall, which pushed email to the easily-accessed Visto servers.
The complete application suite was synchronize-able between Windows-based machines equipped with the Visto software. Syncing to personal information managers (PIMs)--such as Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes, Lotus Organizer, and ACT!--was achieved by licensing IntelliSync technology. Synchronization was limited to Windows machines, but the synchronized information was available from any machine running Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator/Communicator. Other browsers were not supported.
Initial code development was in Java, but performance proved too slow for customer satisfaction and scalability. In late 1997, early 1998, the transition of the complete code base from Java to C++ cost the company six months of product advancement, diminishing market lead and allowing competitors such as Yahoo to catch up with the functionality Visto offered for their own consumer services.
In 2008, Visto provides only corporate email services, billing itself as a "mobile email provider."
In December 2005 Visto filed a lawsuit against Microsoft for "misuse of proprietary technology".[1] Also in December 2005, Visto signed a licensing agreement with NTP, Inc., further increasing its patent pool, in exchange for NTP receiving an equity stake in Visto. In February 2006, Visto sued competitor Good Technology for alleged violations of four patents related to Good's wireless email technology. Again on May 1, 2006, Visto sued competitor, Research In Motion for alleged patent infringement.[2]
On 3 March 2008, Visto and Microsoft announced they had reached a settlement and licensing agreement involving cash and non-cash consideration. Both companies will dismiss all pending legal claims.[3]
In July 2009, the case was settled, with Research in Motion paying Visto $267.5 million.[4]