REDWOOD CITY, Calif.—Visto Corp. entered mobile e-mail fray in China as it announced it would join a Chinese partner in providing push e-mail service to enterprises and professionals in the world’s largest mobile market.
The California company will join Lenovo Chinaweal System & Service Co. Ltd., the system integration subsidiary of Lenovo Group Ltd., in offering the service in both English and Chinese on a dozen devices.
“This service is the first of its kind in China and unlike competing mobile e-mail offerings, the Visto Mobile solution is available immediately on a broad range of mobile devices,” said Brian Bogosian, president, chairman and chief executive officer at Visto.
Bogosian’s remarks may have been directed at Research In Motion Ltd.’s own announcement last week that it would begin rolling out BlackBerry service in China, beginning with existing subscribers who work for multinational corporations in China. RIM is not expected to introduce handsets for the Chinese market until later this year.
Earlier this month, Visto filed a lawsuit against RIM alleging that the Canadian company had violated four of its patents and seeking an injunction that would shut down RIM’s BlackBerry service, on the heels of RIM’s $612.5 million settlement with NTP Inc. RIM has countersued, questioning the validity of Visto’s patents.
Visto’s action against RIM came on the heels of a jury’s $3.6 million judgment in Visto’s favor against rival Seven Networks, Inc., which found that Seven’s service violated five Visto claims and three of its patents. Seven said it would appeal the ruling and, in any case, it would modify its software to work around the patents claimed by Visto.
Visto also has similar lawsuits pending against Microsoft Corp. and Good Technology Inc.
