MobileIron Replaces CEO With CFO Simon Biddiscombe

Mobile device management firm MobileIron announced Tuesday that, less than two years into his tenure, CEO Barry Mainz is leaving the company and being replaced with Chief Financial Officer Simon Biddiscombe.

The company didn't go into specifics about the reasons for Mainz's departure; it said a "mutual decision" was reached between Mainz and the MobileIron board, and that the move would "accelerate growth and profitability" at the company.

[Related: MobileIron, Lenovo Team Up To Better Secure Windows 10 PCs With The Help Of The Channel]

"The progress we've made during [Mainz's] tenure has laid the foundation for MobileIron's next stage of growth," MobileIron Chairman Tae Hea Nahm said in a news release.

The announcement came as MobileIron shared preliminary results for the third quarter, ended Sept. 30, with quarterly revenue pegged at between $42 million and $43 million. That's below a consensus of Wall Street analyst estimates, which had forecast that MobileIron's sales for the quarter would reach $45.2 million. The company reports its third-quarter results on Oct. 31.

MobileIron has remained as an independent publicly traded player in the highly competitive MDM market as many of its rivals have joined forces with larger tech companies, including AirWatch, which sold to VMware in 2014 for $1.54 billion.

Mainz had served as CEO of MobileIron since January 2016 and, before that, had been the president of Intel subsidiary Wind River.

Biddiscombe, who has been appointed as president and board member in addition to the CEO role, had been the CFO at MobileIron since May 2015. Before that, he was the CFO of revenue management firm ServiceSource, while earlier he was CEO of storage and networking firm QLogic.

Biddiscombe "has excelled as a leader and driven significant operational improvement" since joining MobileIron, Nahm said in the news release.

MobileIron named its vice president of finance, Shawn Ayers, as interim CFO.

In the last 36 months, MobileIron shares have lost about 58 percent of their value.