Apple Device Management Firm Addigy Finds Tailwinds In WFH, Mac Ramp-Up

The company is expanding its work with MSPs and resellers as demand surges for remote management tools.

Addigy is capitalizing on its specialty in cloud-based remote management of Macs and other Apple devices as widespread work-from-home continues, while Apple’s heightened focus on Mac signals further growth ahead, CEO Jason Dettbarn told CRN.

The Miami-based provider of Apple device management software is seeing the sort of growth that was reminiscent of what happened early on in the Windows MSP market, said Dettbarn, a veteran of Kaseya who founded Addigy in 2014.

[Related: Apple CEO: Mac, iPad Driving ‘Very Strong’ Growth During COVID-19]

The growth of Mac usage in businesses has already been “very solid,” he said--and now Apple is preparing to launch the first Macs with its own “Apple Silicon” processors by the end of this year.

“As we see Apple taking this as a very serious focus, we’re really excited,” Dettbarn said. “Because rising tides raise all ships, and fundamentally we’re the only platform in the market at a cloud level that can do anything enterprise-worthy [with managing Macs]. And our MSPs all take advantage of that.”

Dettbarn said the company stands out in the market with its capabilities to remotely push out configurations to Macs, a feature that has been getting a massive amount of usage with countless companies operating with highly distributed remote workforces. Addigy license growth from MSPs is up 30 percent this year, he said.

“Coming from Kaseya, we knew what the MSP market and the channel market would need—we knew what a real cloud-based IT tool needs to be,” Dettbarn said. “Now we really need services and cloud tools for what is the new way of doing business.”

Addigy’s vice president of channel strategy, Adam Segar, said the company is also now bringing a greater focus to working with resellers.

“We want to begin to service people at where they buy their hardware,” Segar said. “There’s a ton of need for more solutions in the space that help manage devices.”

Ben Greiner, president and founder of Chicago-based solution provider Forget Computers, said that Addigy’s software has been crucial as his company had previously been “running into roadblocks” in serving customers.

“One is that idea of multi-tenancy--the idea that I can have multiple clients in an instance that I can both separate securely, but operate on at scale if I need to make the change. And that was something that was not native to our previous solution, but that is something that’s built into Addigy,” Greiner said. “And I think a lot of that comes from Jason Dettbarn -- he comes from the Windows world with Kaseya. So he has a clear understanding of how that world needs to operate. And I think he’s the first one that I know of that’s applied that to an Apple-focused view of the world.”

Meanwhile, at New York-based solution provider Valiant, adopting Addigy has similarly paid off--as the company had previously had to use a “hodgepodge” of solutions to deliver an ideal level of service to macOS devices, said service manager Ryan Loughran.

“It was difficult to keep [clients’ software] up to date, when we had our mix of RMM tools. But once we brought Addigy into place, it checked all the boxes for all of our creative clients,” Loughran said. “We were able to support their devices with much more ease. And we were also able to keep all their software up to date, natively in just one place, instead of me having to build custom packages. Addigy just handled all of that and made life easy.”

Previously, setting up new Macs for users was a lengthy process, but with Addigy much of the work is fully automated, he noted.

“We can get the machine out of the box, power it on, and Addigy takes care of the rest,” Loughran said. “And now, especially with everyone working from home, we can’t have an engineer personally hand a machine to a user at a client. So, with Addigy and Apple Business Manager, we can ship the device directly to the user, they unbox it and power it on, Addigy runs itself in the background for 20 minutes, and then the person can just start working on their machine.”

For Apple, work-from-home demand and recent refreshes for the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro helped contribute to strong results for Mac during the company’s latest quarter. Mac revenue rose 22 percent to reach $7.08 billion during Apple’s fiscal third quarter, ended June 27.

And with the “massive investment” that Apple is making into developing its own processors for its Mac lineup, Dettbarn said he expects to see Apple pushing even harder to grow its Mac sales to justify the investment.

“Now they’ve got to really produce volume [for Mac]. Because anytime you’re making your own chips, it’s about volume,” Dettbarn said. “In order to be profitable [on making processors], they’re really going to need to crank out a lot more units.”