Apple Inc. has bought a company called Fleetsmith Inc., which makes tools that help companies to deploy iPhones, iPads and Mac computers to their workers more easily.

The announcement was made in a blog post today on Fleetsmith’s website. Although Apple primarily sells phones and computers to consumers, in recent years it has turned its attention to the enterprise market, where it sees a big opportunity for growth. It has partnered with major enterprise software firms, including IBM Corp. and SAP SE, and tried to persuade businesses to buy its devices for their workers.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said in 2017 that the enterprise market was the “mother of all opportunities” for the company, and the acquisition of Fleetsmith gives it an important new capability, enabling those customers to adopt its hardware at a much greater scale.

Fleetsmith sells mobile device management software that makes it simple for businesses to remotely configure, deploy and wipe any kind of Apple device. The company was founded in 2016 and has raised more than $40 million in venture capital from investors such as Menlo Ventures.

Fleetsmith said in the blog post it was “looking forward to continuing to deliver Fleetsmith to existing and new customers.”

Apple normally makes acquisitions in order to bring in an important new capability at a fairly low price, and that seems to be its strategy with Fleetsmith today. One of Fleetsmith’s biggest competitors is Jamf Software LLC, which sells similar mobile device management tools, and is reportedly in the process of going public at a valuation of $3 billion.

Fleetsmith generally targets smaller customers than Jamf, but its software features a very streamlined interface that probably appeals to Apple’s minimalist design ethos. And there’s no reason why Apple can’t scale up Fleetsmith’s software to help much bigger customers. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Apple almost certainly paid a lot less than it would have cost to acquire Jamf.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that with enterprise services being one of Apple’s main future growth strategies, it needs a device management capability both to improve its customer services and to boost revenue.

“Clearly Apple will have to duke it out with more established mobile device management vendors in the space that can satisfy the heterogeneous device landscape of enterprises better,” Mueller said. “But I would not be surprised to see Apple offering similar services, at a cost, to multidevice users as well.”

Image: Fleetsmith