Post-nuptial BlackBerry gives birth to Good-looking offspring

BlackBerry completed the $425m acquisition of former bitter rival Good and announced the fruit of their loins today.

With plenty of overlap between the two, what's been culled? It's hard to know at this stage, but BlackBerry says the new products reflect BlackBerry's strengths in MDM (mobile device management) and Good's strength in secure application development, and containers.

Jeff Holleran, Blackberry's VP of Corporate Strategy, highlighted a few examples. MDM comes to Mac OS X clients and there's secure email for the iOS email client.

"Anyone can make an application – but making it work securely with backend systems behind firewalls is tough," he said. "You can now get an email from a co-worker that's delivered over the secure email infrastructure, click an intranet link, and it takes you into the intranet. You don't need to follow 72 steps to open up a VPN client then hope the connection doesn't drop on the Tube."

Good Connect IM gets support for Microsoft Lync and Cisco Jabber environments, while the Good Share can now talk to consumer cloud services. BlackBerry's secure document protection WatchDox also gets an upgrade with added sync. The low-cost subscription model starts at $3 per seat per month with collaboration at $10 per seat per month, up to $25 for the Good Secure Content Suite. Holleran declined to comment on what cost savings BlackBerry might achieve, but stressed that "we're going to grow the enterprise sales force, and grow our presence." ®