DataViz quietly acquired by RIM for $50M?
Along with Quickoffice, DataViz's Documents To Go is one of the longstanding stalwarts of the mobile document editing game, stretching back into Windows CE's early days and beyond -- but the future of the company's direction is in question on news that it's apparently been snapped up by RIM in a deal valued around $50 million. Nothing official's been said at this point, but the evidence is growing, most notably the fact that a number of DataViz employees on LinkedIn have updated their profiles to indicate that they're now employed by Waterloo. If you're the conspiracy theory type, you might appreciate this little morsel: DataViz recently blamed its cancellation of the WebOS version of Documents To Go on shifting business needs after a delay brought on by SDK issues, but a far more likely explanation would be that RIM isn't really interested in producing versions of Documents To Go for competing platforms going forward. Windows Phone, Android, and iOS users: we sense trouble.
Update: And here's RIM's official statement, suggesting that some slivers of DataViz's assets weren't acquired (though it's unclear what has happened to them):
"RIM has acquired some of the assets of DataViz and hired the majority of its employees to focus on supporting the BlackBerry platform," the company said in a statement. "Terms of the deal were not disclosed but the transaction was not material to RIM in the context of RIM's financial results."
