Another bring your own device-focused investment to add to the pile: Miradore, a Finnish mobile device management startup, has announced it’s just closed a €1.2 million Series B funding round, with new backers including Finnish VC firm Inventure and Belgian ICT executive Willem Hendrickx. Hendrickx, currently SVP EMEA at Riverbed Technology, has served as an advisor to Miradore since June 2011 and will also now join the board, bringing “extensive expertise in building and developing direct and indirect global sales channels,” according to the startup. Sami Lampinen, managing director at Inventure, also joins the board.
The investment will be used primarily to strengthen Miradore’s global sales. The majority of its business is still in Finland, but it says partners and sales are “ramping up” in several international markets — including the U.S., UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Brazil, Singapore and Hong Kong. “The funding round ensures we have the resources required for the next steps in our path to the global IT and mobile device management markets and the capability to serve both existing and new customers in an optimal way,” said Kristian Järnefelt, CEO of Miradore, in a statement.
As with other competitors in this space, Miradore’s technology aims to make it easier for organizations to manage the increasingly diverse portfolio of devices being pushed inside their walls by the BYOD trend that’s washing away the prescriptive IT department model of yesteryear. (A recent report by Forrester on mobile adoption in the enterprise found that 66 percent of employees now use two or more devices every day, including desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets.)
Miradore offers a single cloud-based dashboard for unified remote management of what it describes as “a wide variety” of computers, tablets and smartphones — a dashboard that it says can scale to cover tens of thousands of devices. Its platform supports Windows, Linux, OS X for Mac, Android, iOS for iPhone/iPad, Symbian and Windows Phone. Key customer segments include managed service providers (MSPs) — who provide IT services to multiple customers with diverse IT environments — and retail chains with a number of geographically dispersed outlets.
One such partner on the retail side is Fujitsu America, which uses Miradore’s technology in its point-of-sale management offering — branded “Fujitsu Retail Systems Management, powered by Miradore” — although that is not a BYOD-related deployment. The startup says it can also track network printers and routers and switches.
Järnefelt tells TechCrunch the startup has about 30 active MSP customers — in turn serving a total of around 200 end customers. “Our largest end customer reference is UPM, which is the third largest paper and pulp company in the world, with about 35,000 managed devices, and smallest end customer is a SMB company having just five devices. In total Miradore is used to manage about 200,000 devices,” he says.
Miradore is not short of big-name competitors. Järnefelt lists the likes of BMC, CA, Symantec, IBM, HP, LanDesk, Kaseya, N-Able, and Dell Kace as offering rival BYOD services, although he reckons Microsoft’s configuration management offerings are at least complementary to what it can offer. “We regard them more as a partner, because we can complement them by offering asset management, license management and some other features too that they do not have,” he notes.
“Miradore is on the verge of an international breakthrough,” added Inventure’s Lampinen in a statement. “The core team has worked extremely hard to open doors to international markets and has shown great progress in building partnerships and scaling the business. With the new capital, they are better positioned to benefit from the sales potential in growth markets such as Asia and Brazil.”
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