Visto follows RIM into China

Last week RIM announced that they would be heading to China with their BlackBerry. Visto doesn’t want them to have all of the fun, so they are also staking out a piece of the 400 million mobile users in China. BlackBerry’s rival has announced a partnership with Lenovo, the Chinese company which bought IBM’s PC division, which will take the Visto enterprise-grade mobile push e-mail offering to the Chinese market. Lenovo will offer the Visto solution on 12 different devices in both English and Chinese. Like RIM, Visto views the Chinese market as a crucial piece of future growth. They chose Lenovo as a partner in large part because the company has the resources to get to market quickly.

This opens up yet another battle ground between Visto and RIM. Not only are they competing in the North American market, but Visto sued RIM for patent infringement and RIM has countersued Visto. RIM claims that Visto’s patents are invalid.