GoPro urges staff to use Mac and iOS over Windows and Android

In a telling example of the growing use of Apple products as core enterprise devices, extreme sports camera firm GoPro has revealed that it urges all staff members to use MacBook devices, rather than Windows PCs.
GoPro has been in existence since 2003, and has grown from five members of staff to just shy of 500. In that time, Apple devices have become the norm in the company.
Speaking exclusively to V3, the firm's chief technology officer, Stephen Baumer, explained that he has pushed the use of Mac devices over Windows for several reasons.
"There's always been this thing that it's cheaper to run your whole enterprise on Windows, but I don't believe that. If you look at the virus footprint alone and what that means for a company – that's non-existent for us," he said. "We give users the option and if they really want Windows we'll try and get them to take a Mac machine and we'll install Windows on it for them, but we try and encourage them to take a Mac."
Baumer, who started his career at Apple in sales engineering in 1995, also explained he'd been frustrated in the past by Windows' dominance in enterprises. "I'd worked at lots of companies where you were forced into having a PC and I always said if I ever had the opportunity to decide IT policy, I wouldn't force people onto Windows machines."
On the smartphone side, the firm operates a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy and the vast majority of its staff – around 93 percent according to Baumer – are iPhone users. The rest are a smattering of Android users, and even fewer Windows Phone advocates.
"We haven't pushed iPhones. I think for a lot of people the iPhone just works and our employees don't feel the need to do this configuration on an Android device, so they just default to iPhones," he said.
As a company that's just 10 years old, GoPro is also heavily based in the cloud, with Baumer claiming 98 percent of all its applications are cloud based. It's only process-heavy, and therefore bandwidth-heavy, video editing requirements that justify the need for on-premise servers, and Baumer said if it's possible in the future, this will be stored in the cloud too.
The tools in use include NetSuite for commerce, AtTask for project management, Arena for project lifecycle management, Workday for HR systems and Dell Boomi for data scheduling. The firm was also with Google's Gmail service for email but has moved to a hosted instance of Exchange due to perceived security concerns.
Baumer said the firm had never really considered on-premise services and added that he is surprised by other young firms that are not following a similar path.
"I always assumed everyone was doing that. Of course you have companies with established infrastructure where the move to cloud for them is not going to happen overnight, but even young companies, I'm taken aback when they say they have 25 percent of applications in the cloud and they consider that aggressive," he said. "I continued to be surprised at how many companies run stuff on premise. Economically it just doesn't seem to make any sense."
Apple's strength in the enterprise market is likely to increase in the coming weeks as both the US and most likely UK government agencies approve the iOS operating system for use by public sector workers