DataViz acquired by RIM

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* Update - Tuesday, September 7th: RIM confirmed the acquisition via a statement given to Digital Daily: RIM has acquired some of the assets of DataViz and hired the majority of its employees to focus on supporting the BlackBerry platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but the transaction was not material to RIM in the context of RIM's financial results. *

DataViz, makers of the popular Documents To Go application, announced sad news today for Palm fans. Though the company started out developing for Palm, they are not going to proceed in developing the Documents To Go solution for Palm WebOS. You can read all about that here.

More interesting than this news from DataViz though is the news they didn't announce..... they were bought by RIM!! Though neither company has publicly announced it (yet), multiple sources have confirmed to us that RIM recently acquired DataViz for a reported $50 million cash (not material to RIM, so they didn't have to disclose it publicly as they have done with other acquisitions like the QNX one). Jump on to LinkedIn and you can also quickly find that lots of former DataViz employees have recently switched up their profiles to Research In Motion as their current employer.

Yet another interesting acquisition by RIM. My guess is this is a bit of an enterprise play - put a BES in your business and every device gets the full version of Documents To Go for free. It would be sweet if that was the case for consumers too!! Add this bit of news to the mix and it's no surprise then that DataViz isn't persuing development for Palm... I'm guessing with time they may start to reduce or phase out work for other non-BlackBerry OEMs too (that one is just a hunch though).

I'd say it's a smart buy for RIM. What do you think?!

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