Mobile device management (MDM) company Mformation Technologies, which tried to juice millions of dollars from BlackBerry-maker RIM in a patent scuffle but ultimately failed, has been acquired by investment firm Clearlake Capital Group in an assets deal — the latest move aimed at capitalizing on the BYOD (bring your own device) trend.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed but Clearlake said it is providing “a significant capital infusion to accelerate” Mformation’s growth — in addition to carrying on serving its existing customers. The investment opportunity here is continued growth of BYOD fueling increased demand within enterprises to manage the smörgåsbord of devices employees increasingly want to use for work.
“Mformation operates at the intersection of several key market trends — such as the proliferation of smart phones and intelligent mobile devices, Machine to Machine (M2M) wireless devices, and the advent of the ‘bring your own device’ phenomenon taking place in enterprises — which are driving the significant increase in demand for scalable mobile device management solutions,” said Prashant Mehrotra, Vice President at Clearlake, in a statement. “We believe the company is well-positioned to address this mission critical need for mobile operators and enterprises.”
“We found Mformation to be the clear market leader in the MDM software market, with a long history of offering scalable solutions to mobile operators and enterprises,” added Behdad Eghbali, Founding Partner at Clearlake, in a statement.
Clearlake has lopped off the company’s Technologies suffix — rebranding it plain old Mformation — but appears less keen to conduct major reconfigurations at senior management level, noting that existing management and operations team will “largely remain the same”. Mformation will also remain in its Edison, New Jersey headquarters.
Clearlake’s Eghbali and Mehrotra will join Mformation’s board of directors, and Eghbali added: “We look forward to partnering with management to aggressively scale the business and grow the global presence of this attractive new platform investment in the mobile software sector.”
Mformation products are currently being used to manage more than 500 million devices, according to the company.