“International Business Machines Corp. and Apple Inc. used to be bitter rivals, but lately they have been spending quality time together.,” Robert McMillan reports for The Wall Street Journal. “More than 100 IBM employees occupy Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., campus helping build iPhone and iPad apps for IBM customers such as Citigroup Inc., Sprint Corp. and Japan Post Holdings Co.”
“Things are looking different inside IBM, too. Once a company of blue suits, Wintel PCs and BlackBerrys, Big Blue is on track to become the world’s largest corporate user of MacBooks,” McMillan reports. “On Wednesday, the company will apply lessons it has learned to introduce a new service intended to help other companies adopt Macs.”
“Apparently, there were Apple fans in the company; when IBM first offered Macs to its workers in May, 185,000 employees read the internal announcement, Chief Information Officer Jeff Smith said. ‘It really hit a nerve with IBMers,’ he added,” McMillan reports. “IBM announced its app collaboration with Apple in July 2014. Within six months, it began shipping 43,000 iPads to its sales force. It now supports more than 110,000 Apple devices including these iPads, MacBooks and iPhones. By year’s end, Mr. Smith expects to manage 50,000 MacBooks alone, a number he has told Apple eventually may grow to 200,000.”
“The new services unveiled Wednesday, designed to help corporate clients deploy Macs by the thousands, are a direct outgrowth of that experience,” McMillan reports. “Much of what IBM knows about getting workers up and running on Macs, it learned from Apple. IBM sent Fletcher Previn, its Workplace as a Service vice president, to Apple headquarters last fall for a weeklong immersion in Apple’s approach to delivering Macs to its own employees. Mr. Previn said he was amazed by the smooth experience Apple had built for its own people… ‘It was certainly eye-opening to see how they are able to manage large numbers of people with far fewer resources than you would see in a traditional PC environment,’ said Mr. Previn.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “It was certainly eye-opening to see how they are able to manage large numbers of people with far fewer resources than you would see in a traditional PC environment.”
No shit. We and many other Mac users have been telling you that for well over a DECADE!
Oh well, better late than never!
SEE ALSO:
IBM could become the biggest buyer of Apple MacBooks – August 1, 2015
IBM ends workers’ Windows PC hell, offers employees Apple Macs for the first time – May 28, 2015
