MobileIron forges on toward IPO

Contact: Scott Denne

Mobile device management (MDM) vendor MobileIron unveiled its S-1 this week, posting strong revenue growth as it inches toward becoming a profitable business. Our surveys indicate that there’s more to come: MobileIron is on the cusp of pulling ahead in a market where spending shows few signs of slowing.

The company finished 2013 with $105.6m in revenue, up from $40.8m in 2012. And it isn’t having a hard time managing that growth. MobileIron’s operational costs are growing at a slower rate than revenue and while it is still far from profitable, its losses shrank to $32.5m last year from $46.5m in 2012. Although its revenue growth is decelerating as it scales, it’s still growing fast: in the most recent quarter, revenue doubled year over year to $28m.

Surveys by TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research, indicate that there’s plenty of blue sky left for the MDM market and MobileIron. In a survey of IT pros last year, 46% expected to spend more on MDM in 2014 than in 2013, up from 41% a year earlier. In those surveys, MobileIron was the second-most-implemented MDM provider (Good Technology was the first, with AirWatch in third and BlackBerry a distant fourth), and was in more planned deployments and trials than any other vendor.

 

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