Foursquare quickly migrates to Fleet for device management

Challenge

Foursquare, a leading location technology company, faced significant challenges with their existing device management solution. The platform's limited support and slow feature rollout hindered innovation and responsiveness, while its inflexible integrations with solutions like Okta Workflows and external logging destinations constrained infrastructure flexibility. Additionally, the lack of advanced DevOps capabilities and a complex, cluttered user interface resulted in operational inefficiencies and a poor user experience for their teams.

Solution

Foursquare recently migrated to Fleet to unify their macOS and Windows devices into a single platform. Fleet also enabled infrastructure-as-code workflows and flexible integrations with their automation workflows and external logging systems. Additionally, Fleet offers advanced query capabilities, a user-friendly interface, and robust support, which led to an easy and quick migration.

Results

The Foursquare engineering team valued Fleet's cleaner and more intuitive user interface, especially when managing multiple operating systems. They appreciate Fleet’s commitment to transparency, enabling full visibility for both the team and their users, and dedication to providing industry-leading support. Fleet also provided ready-to-use GUI tools that streamlined the migration process without additional development.

Their story

Foursquare is a global technology company specializing in combining the physical world with the digital through location intelligence and data science. By leveraging extensive location data, Foursquare provides businesses with actionable insights to drive engagement, improve customer experiences, and optimize operations.

They were looking to:

• Eliminate tool overlap.

• Centralize definitive data.

• Provide a better user experience.

• Integrate and surface data across teams.

• Enable next-gen change management and open-source flexibility.

Eliminate tool overlap

Foursquare was able to replace multiple legacy tools with a single, multi-platform system, reducing tool overlap and operational silos.

Definitive data

Fleet improves observability and vulnerability management through live query capabilities and more user-friendly APIs. These improvements in device monitoring strengthened Foursquare’s overall security posture with a unified reporting language.

Better user experience

An intuitive UI and self-service tools help empower end-users where they can resolve common policy issues without IT intervention, reducing support tickets and increasing efficiency. For the migration itself, Fleet provided native tools for end-users to understand and complete the migration with full transparency.

Next-gen change management and flexibility

Fleet provides the flexibility for engineering teams to audit, customize, and extend the platform as needed with infrastructure-as-code workflows, making device management more agile and automated. While Fleet’s ability to support additional platforms, like Linux, positions Foursquare for future growth and diversification.

Improved support and feature access

Fleet is open-source and has a three-week release schedule that quickly rolls out new features like automated software updates, VPP app support, and policy-based scripts. Faster rollouts and best-in-class support from Fleet enable Foursquare to stay ahead of their device management needs.

Conclusion

Foursquare’s migration to Fleet for device management highlights its commitment to leveraging advanced, flexible, and user-friendly tools to support its infrastructure. Fleet’s forward-thinking feature set, superior support, and emphasis on transparency not only resolved the limitations faced with their previous platform but also positioned Foursquare to better support their teams and build smarter, more efficient workflows.