The Hard Stuff

The first thing to know about enterprise mobility management is that it requires some pretty specific expertise to deploy effectively. "Mobile is hard," said Ojas Rege, chief marketing and strategy officer at enterprise mobility management firm MobileIron. "Anyone that tells you mobile is easy has never done it."

Which is why MobileIron is not focused on bringing its products and services directly to end customers itself. When implementing enterprise mobility initiatives, end customers are highly interested in working with mobile-focused channel partners -- "mobile ninjas," Rege calls them -- and so that's one of the reasons that the channel is where MobileIron puts its sales focus, he said.

The channel-focused strategy at MobileIron has also been crucial to the vendor's resiliency in remaining a standalone player in the market, he said. (Percentages on how much of MobileIron's revenue goes through the channel have not been disclosed, though the company says it goes to market "primarily" through its network of 500 mobile-focused resellers and 40 service providers.)

We spoke with executives at MobileIron and at MobileIron partner Troy Mobility to find out more about what an effective partnership can look like in the enterprise mobility space.