What Good Technology's IPO Means for the EMM Market

Good Technology’s action in filing for an initial public offering (IPO) ended months upon months of speculation about the company’s next move, but it also raises a question: How will its IPO impact the enterprise mobility management (EMM) market?

One Gartner (IT) analyst told MSPmentor via email that Good Technology’s IPO alone isn’t what’s reshaping the EMM landscape. He said the bigger picture is about how larger software vendors such as VMware (VMW) and IBM (IBM) are now players in the market.

“I don’t see a Good IPO in and of itself being as disruptive as the overall trend for the EMM market to fundamentally change as a result of the much larger players in IBM and VMWare that have gotten into this market in the past year paired with the commoditization of basic device management,” Gartner Mobile and Client Computing Research Director Chris Silva said.

Click here for MSPmentor’s mid-year review of the EMM market

Here’s some background about how these vendors entered the market: VMware (VMW) acquired AirWatch in January 2014; and IBM (IBM) acquired Fiberlink Communications in November 2013.

“EMM has become a tough market to serve with much more powerful competitors in play, a general commoditization of basic device management capabilities and downward pressure on product and service price,” he added.

Good Technology’s verdict to go forward with an IPO comes on the heels of MobileIron, one of its top competitors in the space, filing its own IPO with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in March 2014.

“The main goal of MobileIron and Good is to ensure there is a steady stream of capital to fund innovation and awareness,” Silva said. “Their products have to continue growing the mobile platforms they support and the depth to which they support them.”

However, going public doesn’t necessarily mean that Good Technology and MobileIron will be in direct competition with bigger players in the EMM space, he said:

“Many large vendors, including SAP and VMware play in the EMM space, however, their positioning of EMM alongside other products varies greatly between these vendors and others, like Microsoft, who also have a play here. It’s not uncommon to see a vendor that generates the majority of its revenues from software licenses and monolithic system installations to see EMM as a valuable asset to round out the portfolio but not a marquis product to which they will devote major marketing resources. They compete but certainly not head-to-head in a traditional, zero-sum battle for the market market sense.”

As the market continues to witness consolidations and IPOs, independent EMM vendors might start experiencing a little bit of the heat.

“The acquisitions and IPOs will make it increasingly difficult for ‘independents’ to thrive in this market, if for no other reason than because of the marketing juggernauts that have arisen from large IT vendors buying their way into the market and IPO-fueled marketing agendas from newly public players,” he said.

Some independent EMM players, on the other hand, still believe there’s light at the end of the tunnel: “We run our operations as an old-fashioned business, where it’s not about getting market shares or looking for an exit strategy,” SOTI Inc. CEO Carl Rodrigues told MSPmentor in a February interview.

Good Technology, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based EMM provider last week filed a registration statement with the SEC for an IPO that it anticipates will raise $100 million.

Good Technology posted a net loss of $118.4 million on $160.4 million in revenue last year and reported a net loss of $90.4 million on $116.6 million in revenue in 2012.

The filing does not indicate the number of shares to be sold or the price range for the proposed offering.

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