MobileIron has formed an Internet of Things (IoT) division and plans to have an IoT product ready for sale later this year.

MobileIron’s IoT platform will be designed to: use a standards-based, open systems approach for interoperability; deliver scalable, automated life cycle management to mitigate against the possibility of human errors; protect the integrity and the security of petabytes of moving data; and provide continuity for systems that are too critical to fail.

The company also announced that Santhosh Nair has joined MobileIron as vice president of IoT to lead the division. He will work closely with Suresh Batchu, MobileIron’s co-founder and chief technology officer. Nair previously was with Wind River, an Intel company, where he was vice president and general manager of the IoT business unit, and managed key customer relationships across broad markets.

Nair tells Channel Partners that MobileIron sees the same opportunity for partners with IoT that it did with enterprise mobility management (EMM).

“With EMM, many mobile and security specialists took our platform and created new services and technology offerings for their customers,” he said. “Now, with IoT this … is the opportunity to take our technology and put together new and differentiated offerings.”

Bain & Co. estimates that by 2020, IoT vendor revenue could exceed $470 billion.

MobileIron is focused on four industry verticals — health care, energy, manufacturing and automotive — so its IoT would be a “natural fit for partners that have specific experience and relationships in those verticals,” Nair said. The company also has strong partnerships with global mobile operators and there would be a “natural fit there where our technology would be the foundation of a larger IoT offering,” he said.{ad}

“Most current IoT solutions are highly customized and very expensive to maintain,” he said. “With our EMM platform, we showed that we know how to build a platform that can be used horizontally across a range of industries. Our engineering focus is on building a platform that delivers the scale and security customers need and that doesn’t require customization. This means our IoT platform will be less expensive, easier to sell and easier to deploy than current IoT solutions. And, the best part for partners is that we’ve set a target of bringing our IoT platform to market later this year and we are currently working with customers on engineering field trials.”