MobileIron, Lenovo Team Up To Better Secure Windows 10 PCs With The Help Of The Channel

As businesses currently using Windows 7 PCs mull a move to Windows 10, mobile device management firm MobileIron and PC giant Lenovo are combining forces to provide improved security and easier oversight for the new PCs coming online.

Traditionally focused on security and management for smartphones and tablets, Mountain View, Calif.-based MobileIron is aiming to offer more to companies using Windows 10 devices such as laptops with its new partnership with Lenovo, unveiled Tuesday.

The partnership will enable customers to buy Lenovo PCs, tablets and smartphones at the same time as MobileIron's security and management platform—which MobileIron said will amount to "one-stop shopping" for businesses seeking to securely move to Windows 10.

[Related: 16 New ThinkPad Laptops Lenovo Is Launching This Year]

With the partnership, "there's a great opportunity for partners to offer upgrade and migration services around Windows 10," said Kevin White, director of business development at MobileIron, in an emailed statement to CRN.

White cited Microsoft's plan to end security updates for Windows 7 as of January 2020.

"These kinds of upgrades don't happen overnight and companies around the world need to start planning their upgrade strategy," White said. "Channel partners have a great opportunity to work with their customers as trusted advisers."

At PaRaBaL, a fast-growing enterprise mobility solution provider based in Baltimore and a MobileIron partner, CEO Peter Coddington said MobileIron's new partnership with Lenovo is a "good leading indicator and validator of where enterprise mobility is going."

"MobileIron was built to supervise mobile devices and keep pace with the explosion of mobile devices for corporate use," Coddington told CRN. "Because of the success of having products that can do that, companies are saying, 'Hey, do that for my desktops and laptops, too.' "

Part of the rising demand for services at PaRaBaL—which recently expanded to Europe with a Netherlands office—is that customers increasingly value having a single platform for managing all of their devices, he said.

"We're brought in to help with mobile, and they say, 'We want to standardize what we're using for mobile with the rest of our computing,' " Coddington said. "I wouldn't have predicted that eight years ago when I started this company."

As for what the new partnership means for MobileIron, Coddington said that "this Lenovo move helps MobileIron integrate better to Windows infrastructure."

MobileIron's White noted that Lenovo partners will now have access to MobileIron SKUs and offerings.

"MobileIron partners will not be reselling Lenovo but we expect that there will be collaboration in the field," he said.

In a news release, Jerry Paradise, Lenovo's executive director of global enterprise PC, said the Morrisville, N.C., company is working with MobileIron "to give our enterprise customers a secure, agile platform as they build out and update their infrastructure."

MobileIron said in the news release that deploying the company's enterprise mobility management platform on Lenovo PCs could yield an up to 80 percent reduction in a customer's total cost of PC ownership, due in part to lower labor costs.