Jamf

Zach Halmstad wrote the first tools for managing Macs at a university in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and founded Jamf in 2002. The product was long called the Casper Suite before becoming Jamf Pro. It does for macOS and iOS what Group Policy and Active Directory have long done for Windows: push apps, lock down configuration and wipe lost devices.

The business rests entirely on Apple, which is both its strength and its risk. Jamf tends to support new Apple features on release day, but every time Apple builds more device management into its own services, the list of things only Jamf can do gets shorter. It listed on Nasdaq in 2020.