Good Technology Acquires AppCentral to Deliver Highly Secure Mobile App Management

Good Technology, a mobile e-mail vendor also focusing on securing enterprise BYOD devices, announced today that it has reached an agreement to acquire AppCentral, a privately-held mobile application management (MAM) vendor.

AppCentral’s key focus has been delivering a platform that allows enterprises to manage, secure and safely distribute enterprise-grade mobile apps. An enterprise can develop its own app store on the AppCentral platform for approved enterprise applications – the app store in turn becomes the means to allowing users to access the apps they are approved to access.

From Good’s perspective, AppCentral’s mobile app management services – which include AppGuardian, an application “wrapping” technology, will be used to extend the capabilities of the company’s own Good Dynamics platform. These additional solutions allow Good to transition from its long standing “secure the device” approach to a broader capability that allows enterprises to directly protect data and applications.

The “app wrapping” capability builds directly on the application security framework, libraries and services already available in the Good Dynamics platform. By integrating AppCentral into Good Dynamics, Good is now able to offer developers the option to either add an application security wrapper without code integration, or integrate Good Dynamics security libraries directly into their application code.

While both approaches provide enterprise-grade application security, code integration delivers additional benefits, such as enabling developers to define “app-specific” policies, such as controlling file access in collaboration apps based on size, type, or other attributes, and to publish app services that multiple apps can utilize without having to duplicate code across every app, such as search or directory lookup. The combined platform capabilities will deliver the scalability and control needed to manage mobile apps across iOS, Android, and Windows devices, and to do so across environments than can easily have thousands of mobile devices deployed.

AppCentral –and more specifically AppGuardian - taps into the idea of building a mobile defense capability at the mobile app level rather than the more “traditional” mobile device level – which is the domain of mobile management (MDM). MD platforms do a great job of securing mobile devices but they do not necessarily secure what an app – or perhaps a rogue app – might actually be doing behind the scenes of an otherwise secure mobile device. MAM is the logical next step extension of MDM – or the logical evolution of MDM.

MDM companies such as MobileIron and Zenprise are moving to deliver MAM capabilities, and companies such as Mocana partner with many companies to provide core MAM technology on an OEM basis.

AppCentral was founded in late 2007 and is headquartered in San Francisco. The company has been backed by BlueRun Ventures. Financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed. The acquisition closed on October 1, 2012, and Good will retain all AppCentral employees, with the San Francisco offices becoming a Good office.

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