Last year, RIM — maker of the BlackBerry smartphone line — acquired NewBay, a cloud hosting service, for $100 million. But on Friday, Synchronoss, a mobile software company, announced that it is buying NewBay from RIM for $55 million cash.
The New Bay acquisition was seen as a way for RIM to compete with other file hosting and sync services, such as Apple iCloud, Amazon Cloud Drive, and Google Docs (now Google Drive). File sync services were hot at the time. Box was rumored to have turned down a $500,000+ acquisition deal, and Dropbox reportedly turned down a nine-figure acquisition offer from Apple. And Citrix acquired ShareFile, a lesser-known player.
RIM had been acquiring companies like contact management firm Gist and appointment management tool Tungle, suggesting the company was building out a stack of cloud-based mobile apps that would be independent of its own BlackBerry line. Meanwhile, rumor spread that the company would release a cross-platform version of BlackBerry Messenger as competing services like Beluga, GroupMe, and Kik began to challenge the product’s dominance.
As RIM bled market share to Apple and Samsung, these moves suggested that RIM could save itself by becoming a hardware-agnostic mobile software company. That hasn’t happened.
Although RIM began supporting Android and iOS on its popular BlackBerry Enterprise Server, the device management market has dozens of other players, including Good, which actually licenses RIM technology, and Microsoft, which has only recently joined the fray. And RIM shuttered both Gist and Tungle earlier this year to focus on developing similar BlackBerry-only products, and denies that a cross-platform version is on the roadmap.
With the sale of NewBay, it appears any hope for a cross-platform RIM is dead.
So Last Year: RIM Dumps Cloud Hosting Acquisition
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So Last Year: RIM Dumps Cloud Hosting Acquisition
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So Last Year: RIM Dumps Cloud Hosting Acquisition
