Deploying Macs to employees has helped IBM significantly reduce its IT staff and cut down on time and costs, the company’s VP of Workplace-as-a-Service Fletcher Previn explained at a recent talk during the JAMF Nation User Conference (JNUC). Previn offered some insight into how offering Macs has improved efficiency for the company’s internal IT staff since IBM for the first time started offering its employees Macs as an official alternative to PCs back in May.
Previn noted that “Every Mac that we buy is making and saving IBM money,” and that “A Mac still has value three or four years down the road.” An example of the added value of using Macs versus PCs is the amount of support required. IBM has just 24 help desk staff that are supporting around 130,000 Mac and iOS devices deployed throughout the company. That’s just one support member for 5,375 employees, but Previn boasts that’s because only approximately 5% of Mac users request support compared to around 40% of its PC using employees.
IBM originally planned to deploy around 50,000 new Macs to the company by the end of the year when it first announced the initiative back in May. At the JAMF conference it said it’s currently deploying around 1,900 Macs per week with 130,000 Apple devices already in use at the company.
Previn said that Gartner believes the optimal number of IT to employees should be 1:70. Previn noted that the average is 1:242. And IBM is currently hovering around 1:5,400. Wow!
A couple months back Apple and IBM announced an expanded partnership that will see it distribute and support enterprise Macs for other companies in addition to its work together to deploy and support iOS devices and software.
IBM is using JAMF’s Casper suite to deploy software to the Macs.
