20 Oct At IBM, 5% of Mac users need help desk support, compared to 40% of PC users
IBM has successfully deployed 130,000 iOS and Mac devices within the company, supported by 24 help desk staff members, an IBM executive said.
According to a JAMF Software blog post, Fletcher Previn, vice president of Workplace-as-a-Service at IBM spoke at a JAMF user conference this week. He said that only 5 percent of the Mac user base at IBM calls the support desk, compared to 40 percent of Windows users.
Previn does have a vested interest to praise Mac hardware. After all, Apple and IBM have a partnership in which the latter sells Apple devices and builds industry-specific enterprise solutions to native OS X apps.
Still, the statistics are worth taking note of. IBM deploys 1,900 Macs to employees each week. The employees get brand new, shrink-wrapped Apple hardware which they can set up on their own – an arrangement more akin to a BYOD setup than a typical enterprise-IT deployment.
IBM offers this self-serve capability using Apple’s Device Enrollment Program and JAMF Software’s Casper Suite, which lets employees set up approved apps and configuration and takes care of licensing on the backend.
Regardless of how you dice it, the implications of the support figures are staggering, considering how IBM’s example means that a single IT administrator can support over 5,000 Apple devices. “Gartner suggests that if your enterprise has one support person for every 70 employees, you’re doing well,” noted a report on ZDNet.