GEC NEWS WIREMohammed Helaly, Channel Manager of MobileIron says that as a young organization they are future-ready as well as next gen security ready. MobileIron claims the secure delivery of cloud services and mobile experiences that defines the need of modern business.
With over fifteen thousand customers worldwide, MobileIron had started its journey as an MDM vendor and went on to enhance its portfolio to suit the needs of the ever-evolving customers and business. EMM or Enterprise Mobility Management that was launched in 2016 is one such example.
So Mohammed, how has the evolution cycle been for MobileIron since 2016?
After EMM we made further enhancements to our product and renamed it as UEM, ie Unified Endpoint Management. We secure the modern enterprise with a multi-cloud, multi-OS security architecture that puts the human experience first. Presently, we are the only vendors in the market to have added this feature in our new product Mobileiron Threat Defense.
We are a hundred percent channel driven company and sell through our partners in the region. We have two key distributors in the region— Starlink and Redington. We also reach out to our customers through our network of 113 resellers and we cater to the Middle East and whole of African region sans S.Africa, Pakistan and Turkey.
While you started out 5 years back, what kind of market share did you have or how was the go to market approach?
Initially, in 2013, when we started selling through our resellers we realized that organizations are moving more and more to the cloud. That is when we launched our product Mobileiron Access. As a part of our go to market approach we have partnered with lots of carriers and service providers in the region and have already started our MSSP. We have a partnership with STC in Saudi and another one with du here in the UAE. In Egypt we have Vodafone and Orange as well as our other resellers. This region is totally different from Europe and US. In Europe, the first question we are asked is whether we have a cloud solution; if yes, they will move forward. Here the situation is opposite and people want solutions on premise.
In cloud adoption, Uber is our biggest customer with whom we have done a major deployment. Uber has more than a million license of MobileIron. Most of the Uber drivers are using our products Globally, we have more than 50% of the market share in MDM. In Gartner’s quadrant there are 9-10 vendors in the market and MobileIron has 50% market compared to the other 9. The top 10 banks in Saudi are our customer. Speaking of verticals, we are mainly targeting the financial sector and the government sector.
50% market share. In 2018, how will this percentage change?
Our new product MobileIron Threat Defense has fetched us a lot of value. We are seeing a great exposure in the market as people have shifted their focus from only MDM to end-to-end solutions to secure the mobile device. Most of the customers are moving to MobileIron because they wish to have a centralized solution. When we approach a customer they do not have to engage in further discussions with any other vendor because we are the leading and pioneering vendors in this arena and owing to this reason we have over achieved our numbers in the first half of the year.
2018, what are the activities planning for the channels?
We conduct partner roadshow every year to accelerate knowledge around our new product features and portfolio. The partner roadshow is done by us directly for all our distributors and resellers worldwide. We also do quarterly sales and technical enablement sessions that is done by our sales engineers or by us directly. We have done a few events in KSA and UAE this year with our partner Redington. We also have Egypt and Turkey in the roadmap.
What is the strategy for identifying new customers in the market?
We follow three models for identifying our potential customers in the market. Initially its though our lead generation system through which we push leads to our distributors or resellers. Secondly it is through key events held in conjunction with our partners. Thirdly, directly by our partners. Partners help us in expanding our base by conducting various roadshows where they directly talk to the customers. We have done two customer roadshows so far where we invited the top CIOs in each country.
