Industry Update: 5 Questions for Jason Dettbarn

If you work in an environment with managed Apple devices, you’ve probably heard the news that came in across the wire on Wednesday morning: Apple acquired Fleetsmith, a San Francisco-based Apple device management company.

Whether or not you’ve been watching the conversations happening live in the MacAdmins Slack channel, you may be wondering what this means for the Apple devices in your network or other mobile device management (MDM) players in the field.

As a company that offers more than just MDM solutions, we have a few thoughts on the topic. Our founder and CEO Jason Dettbarn gives his take on a few of the common questions we’ve heard.

1: What Does the News That Apple Acquired an Apple Device Management Company Mean?

Every time Apple adds new capabilities to their hardware, software, or services, a new conversation starts up around what the future of Apple devices will look like. Each evolution gives companies that build software that integrates with the Apple ecosystem a step up.

This week’s announcement is exciting news for Addigy: today we’re having a more expansive conversation about the future of Apple device management and MDM solutions. I believe that Apple getting involved in MDM will benefit the ecosystem and elevate market leaders.

2: Is This Acquisition an MDM Integration Play?

There’s no clear answer to this question yet. This acquisition aligns with the moves we’ve seen coming out of Cupertino in the past year-and-a-half, but we don’t yet know exactly how Apple plans to make use of MDM capabilities.

3: Why is Apple Investing More in MDM Solutions Now?

This acquisition is a great play for a company that’s established the marketplace for MDM and continues to invest in growing their share of the enterprise market – and winning.

Apple started as a computer company, and they’ve stayed true to that. But they’ve also continued to diversify their portfolio of devices for the business market. Their investment in an MDM company makes sense when you consider how many mobile devices Apple has added to their business ecosystem in the past decade.

This acquisition also fits into Apple’s continued interest in supporting integrated Apple device management at scale. This is the first time Apple has acquired a tool that’s explicitly designed to help businesses manage their Mac fleets, and this attention to enterprise needs is great news for business users.

4: What Does This Mean for Addigy?

This acquisition isn’t about us, but it tells me that we’re on the right track. This acquisition demonstrates Apple’s continued involvement in enriching SMB and enterprise environments with devices that keep users productive and enable IT admins to provide remote support to end users from wherever they’re working.

Apple users in business settings are happier, more productive, and more efficient than their counterparts on competing operating systems. I take this move as a sign that Apple continues to inspire the marketplace with the features they provide for mobile device management, and that’s good news for everyone.

While we don’t know exactly what these changes will look like yet, they’ll likely provide Addigy and other vendors with deeper integration capabilities to meet the needs of the business market. This means that we’ll have more to build off of and opportunities for better integrations.

Our team will continue to innovate in this space and work to improve live support at a time when device management has never been more important.

5: What’s Next?

If you know two things about Apple, it’s likely that they make best-in-class products and that they don’t rush on the road to delivery. While we look forward to hearing more about coming changes in the new product releases this fall, you can bet that Apple will continue to excel and lead the market forward.

The minds behind Apple understand the importance of managing the devices in the hands of employees, and so do we. At Addigy, we’ll continue to work to push the envelope of what remote mobile device management software can do.

Our software is currently the only Apple device management solution that provides live connectivity to remote devices. We’re excited to offer our customers Addigy GoLive, a set of features designed to help IT teams manage Apple devices in real time.

If you’ve enjoyed following the news from Apple last week and are looking for an opportunity to dig in deeper, sign up for our WWDC recap on Tuesday, June 30 with John Sutcliffe, our head of product.