Large employers increasingly buying Fitbits in bulk for employees

Barclays is one of 20 companies to recently sign on to bring Fitbits to their employees, buying the wearables company's devices in bulk, according to a Forbes report.

Barclays will provide the devices to 75,000 employees through a cost-sharing plan before expanding that to its 140,000 global employees.

"Barclays' administrative and human resources team don't have to take on the legwork of distribution," Ben Sommers, business development leader for Fitbit's corporate wellness division, told Forbes. "Fitbit will ship that device directly from our warehousing facility to the destination of choice."

Other companies to recently sign on as enterprise customers include BMC Software and GoDaddy.com.

The customer wins follow some bumpy times for Fitbit. While the company's IPO effort proved extremely successful, its gross margins dropped two months later with shares dipping below 14 percent. Prior to the IPO, Fitbit was sued by competitor Jawbone, which claimed Fitbit had poached employees and some of those employees stole proprietary data.

Fitbit's latest corporate client growth, notes Forbes, may be due, in part, to the device announcing that it is HIPAA compliance, which could help eliminate user concerns regarding data security and privacy protection, two worries that have long been cited as obstacles to mHealth wearable adoption.

Still, the company last week came under fire after Fortinet researcher Axell Aprville showed a proof of concept of how a hacker could potentially use the fitness tracker to spread malware and manipulate device data at the Hack.Lu conference in Luxembourg. Fitbit denies that its devices are vulnerable.

For more information:
- read the Forbes report