Ivanti Acquiring MobileIron, Pulse Secure to Support Work from Anywhere

Ivanti is shelling out $872 million for MobileIron and is acquiring Pulse Secure in a separate deal. Ivanti didn’t divulge the purchase price for Pulse Secure.

MobileIron provides mobile-centric unified endpoint management products and services, while Pulse Secure offers secure access and mobile security offerings.

MobileIron’s board of directors unanimously approved the deal and recommended stockholders vote their shares in favor of the transaction. Ivanti will acquire Pulse Secure from affiliates of Siris Capital Group.

The company said the combination will “cement” its leadership in unified endpoint management, zero-trust security and enterprise service management.

Ivanti will allow customers to discover, manage, service and automate across all device types with the Ivanti Neurons automation platform. Additionally, customers will benefit from the expanded scale, corporate resources, service capabilities and financial flexibility that Ivanti will deliver.

Once it completes the transactions, Ivanti chairman and CEO Jim Schaper will continue to lead the combined company.

Ivanti’s Jeff Abbott

“The acquisitions of MobileIron and Pulse Secure provide Ivanti with the ability to offer customers a comprehensive set of software solutions that address the growing market demand for the future of work,” said Jeff Abbott, Ivanti’s CEO. “Together with the solutions from MobileIron and Pulse Secure, Ivanti is now the only vendor that can discover, manage, secure and service across all device types – including IoT and mobile devices.”

Further details regarding Ivanti’s partners will be announced following the close of the MobileIron and Pulse Secure acquisitions, he said.

“That said, our mission is to enable and resource our partner community to best represent and support Ivanti’s solution portfolio,” Abbott said. “We’re working diligently to ensure our partner program provides profitability and an ease of doing business with Ivanti that allows partners to invest their time and resources to driving and supporting all of Ivanti’s solutions into the market.”

Invanti Is a ‘Complicated Amalgamation’

Eric Parizo is senior analyst with Omdia. He said Ivanti is a “complicated amalgamation” of several previously acquired companies. Its technologies include: supply chain management from Wavelink; security patch management from Shavlik; endpoint management from AppSense; IT service management from FrontRange; and unified endpoint management from Lumension.

Omdia’s Eric Parizo

“Its strategy has been to provide a unified platform for endpoint security and management,” Parizo said.

However, COVID-19 has accelerated the need for many security vendors to find a way to provide “far-flung employees and other stakeholders with secure remote access to applications and data that may reside in a traditional data center, in a SaaS application or a hybrid cloud environment,” he said.

“Ivanti’s move to acquire both MobileIron and Pulse Secure supports that objective,” Parizo said. “MobileIron has strong identity technology, including single sign-on with passwordless multifactor authentication. Ivanti no doubt intends to integrate that technology with Pulse Secure’s Zero Trust Access (PZTA) platform, a cloud-delivered solution for secure access to not only public, private, and multicloud applications, but also data center resources.”

Ivanti Gets Zero-Trust Access

This new combination of Ivanti, MobileIron and Pulse Secure will give Ivanti a zero-trust access (ZTA) solution, Parizo said. That’s a class of technologies that facilitates secure access to applications and other IT resources across hybrid cloud environments.

“ZTA is quickly becoming a competitive requirement for any cybersecurity vendor that is in the business of secure client connectivity,” he said. “And this move will in turn help keep Ivanti competitive going forward.”

As for MobileIron, it had been looking for an exit strategy for some time, Parizo said. That dates back to when Simon Biddiscombe became CEO several years ago.

“Considering it has long struggled to find that exit, this can only be seen as a successful conclusion for MobileIron’s patient investors,” he said.

Pulse Secure has been successful since its separation from Juniper Networks, Parizo said.

“So I can only imagine the acquisition price was quite lucrative to make a deal happen,” he added.

In August, Ivanti, which is in Clearlake Capital’s portfolio, announced a new strategic investment from TA Associates. Clearlake and TA partnered to fund the strategic acquisitions.