The company was founded in 2007 by Ajay Mishra and Suresh Batchu and is headquartered in Mountain View, California. MobileIron was an early pioneer in mobile security and management for smartphones and tablet computers, such as iPhone, iPad, Android, and earlier mobile devices such as Symbian and Windows Phone. During the five year period from 2009 to 2013, MobileIron was named the fastest growing technology company and ranked #1 on the Deloitte Fast 500 Index. It became publicly traded in 2014 on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol MOBL. After its share price fell from $9 at the time of the IPO to below $4 in early 2016, the company's founding CEO Bob Tinker was replaced by Barry Mainz as CEO, but remained on the company's board of directors. Simon Biddiscombe was appointed CEO in October 2017.
Products
MobileIron's software allows the security and management of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers in an enterprise environment, as well as the secure mobile access to enterprise data. As of June 2015 it held about 9.2% of global EMM market share. MobileIron was listed as a "leader" in Gartner's June 2015 study "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Mobility Management Suites", together with AirWatch, Citrix, IBM and BlackBerry. In a 2016 review of MDM solutions, Markus Pierer described MobileIron as the market leader, highlighting its complete support of mobile operating systems, layered security model and fast development and release cycle, but noted its "suboptimal" support that depended on partners or resellers. Also in 2016, CIO magazine, citing Gartner's study, noted that MobileIron faced increasing competition as "one of the last remaining stand-alone EMM vendors". It named platform compatibility, third party integration and customer satisfaction as some of MobileIron's strengths, but mentioned an outdated UI and unsatisfactory support among its weaknesses. As of 2016, MobileIron's principal competitors include Microsoft's Enterprise Mobility Suite. Other major EMM competitors are IBM, as well as SAP, Dell/VMWare and BlackBerry who entered the EMM market after their acquisition of previously independent vendors Sybase, AirWatch and Good Technology. In January 2018, MobileIron partnered with Google Cloud to distribute Google apps through MobileIron’s EMM platform and to provide a secure enterprise applications and services portal.
