MobileIron lands reseller deal with Lenovo

Enterprise mobility management firm MobileIron announced that it has inked a reseller partnership with PC giant Lenovo. Under the deal, Lenovo will resell MobileIron's security and management platform to enterprise customers purchasing Lenovo PCs, tablets, and smartphones.

According to MobileIron, the partnership underscores the massive shift from legacy security tools to EMM for PC management.

"Modern enterprise computing means moving to modern operating systems like Windows 10, Android, and iOS, and using EMM to secure all your devices from mobile to desktops," said MobileIron CEO Barry Mainz. "As the market leader in PC sales, Lenovo is leading that transition on the hardware front and this partnership with MobileIron adds the critical security layer that companies need for modern operating systems."

Mainz is just wrapping up his first year as MobileIron's chief executive, after replacing MobileIron founder Bob Tinker in January 2016. At the time, Mainz said he planned to work to help MobileIron, which went public in 2014, become the "applications and security backbone" for end-user computing. The Lenovo partnership is a certainly a step in that direction.

MobileIron recently expanded its portfolio with the launch of a new Internet of Things division -- a move that's not totally unexpected given Mainz's history in IoT. Before MobileIron, Mainz was the president of Wind River, an Intel subsidiary with various IoT-related products.