Several days ago MobileIron, a key vendor in the mobile device management (MDM) space, took a next step in growing its capabilities beyond pure device management. With the release of MobileIron v5, the company is looking to deliver on two critical enterprise challenges - data loss prevention (DLP) for iOS e-mail attachments and the ability to easily scale the platform for large global deployments.

From a marketing perspective, meanwhile, the company is looking to change how it is perceived by enterprises by moving away from referencing itself as an MDM vendor and shifting its positioning to what it now calls "mobile IT."  What that means is that MobileIron is now trying to segment a piece of enterprise IT as specifically targeting enterprise mobility. Well, OK, it is certainly a fair thing for MobileIron to do, especially as the company and its competitors begin to tackle the issue of growing their overall capabilities to cover mobile application management (MAM).

MobileIron hasn't been shy about doing so. It began its transition back on June 7, 2012, when it first introduced Docs@Work (a secure document container offering end-to-end security for both ActiveSync email attachments and SharePoint content), its Application Delivery Network (AppDN) and App Connect for Android (News - Alert).

The new release now takes Docs@Work a step farther down the road by iOS e-mail attachments. Enterprises can now prevent corporate e-mail attachments from being uploaded from native iOS e-mail to, for example, consumer services such as Dropbox (News - Alert) and other "consumer" cloud services that enterprises have no control over. The idea is to give enterprise IT more control over the data it owns - a particularly important issue relative to BYOD. Aside from enterprises across a wide variety of industries, in particular Docs@Work is important to industries such as healthcare and financial services, where privacy and data security require on an entirely deeper level of control.

MobileIron v5 also claims to deliver the industry’s most scalable architecture, supporting 100,000 devices fully configured with e-mail, apps, Wi-Fi, VPN, and certificates per server. Though we aren't aware of any real world enterprises that come close to testing this parameter (by which we mean are actually ready to scale to 100,000 users or even close to it), MobileIron does have a number of large scale deployments, though we don't if any of these enterprises have added any of the new v5 capabilities to their deployments as yet. We look forward to speaking with MobileIron in depth and to some of these enterprise customers over the next several months.

With the latest version of Docs@Work now offered in v5, enterprises are easily able to protect iOS e-mail attachments, prevent unauthorized distribution of documents, provide secure access to SharePoint, control cut/copy/paste actions (a more subtle way for users to otherwise move documents and data around than direct file uploads and downloads), and the ability to store and selectively wipe documents.

MobileIron v5, meanwhile, continues to offer its robust MDM capabilities, its ability to manage multiple servers through a central console for large scale deployments, the ability to deliver gigabyte-sized apps without latency via its App Delivery Network, manage hundreds of thousands of mobile certificates per customer, and register hundreds of devices simultaneously per customer. MobileIron also delivers the ability to test infrastructure for massive scale.

Want to learn more about today’s powerful mobile Internet ecosystem? Don't miss the Mobility Tech Conference & Expo, collocated with ITEXPO West 2012 taking place Oct. 2-5 2012, in Austin, TX.  Stay in touch with everything happening at Mobility Tech Conference & Expo. Follow us on Twitter.