IBM today announced new cloud-based IT services to help clients quickly, easily and securely integrate Macs with their enterprise systems and applications.
This new offering from IBM MobileFirst Managed Mobility Services is designed to help large enterprises incorporate Macs within their IT infrastructures – a rising requirement, as more clients adopt or allow the use of Macs by their employees. Shipments of Macs are growing faster than the industry average, and the Mac has outgrown the PC industry every year for the last decade.
These new mobility services for Mac are based on experience IBM gained through its internal Mac@IBM program, with IBM deploying Macs to employees around the globe at speed and scale, in a highly secure enterprise environment. With its partnership with Apple, this presented an opportunity for IBM to commercialize this offering using its own experience in enterprise deployment and the ability to scale to clients’ specific needs.
IBM also has been providing these services on a custom basis for a variety of clients and with the growing interest in adopting Macs into the enterprise, IBM is now offering them as a standard services offering. The integration services for Mac are delivered via the cloud as a software-as-a-service solution and also are available as an on-premise solution in the client’s data center.
“Ease of adoption and use are at the foundation of every Apple product, and as these devices are used more in the workplace, people expect the same experience they enjoy with Apple technology in their personal lives,” said Richard Patterson, general manager, Infrastructure Services, IBM Global Technology Services. “IBM’s new enterprise services ensure a great user experience for clients using Macs, providing world-class support from installation through the life of the product.”
With these new services, clients can order Macs and have them delivered directly to their employees without any additional set-up, imaging or configuration, saving time, reducing costs and creating a great employee experience. Employees can then quickly, easily and securely gain network access, connect to email and download business applications. The services also can support personally owned Macs that are authorized in a bring-your-own-device environment.
The new services feature the Casper Suite from JAMF Software, the leading software solution for helping clients quickly set up and deploy Macs, including MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, iMac, and Mac Pro. With the combination of Casper Suite and IBM’s enterprise integration and support services, clients can work with IBM to directly procure, integrate and manage Macs across their IT infrastructures and employee bases. These services also can support clients who choose to deploy both Macs and iOS devices within their enterprises.
“Today’s announcement is a powerful testament to the growing demand for Apple technology in the enterprise and to the strong relationship between IBM and JAMF to help organizations inventory, deploy and secure their Apple devices,” said Dean Hager, CEO, JAMF Software. “This is a great opportunity for us to work with IBM in helping businesses and other large organizations succeed with Apple.”
This new offering is an enhancement to IBM’s MobileFirst services portfolio, specifically designed to support Macs. It complements existing IBM enterprise services supporting iOS devices, including iPad and iPhone, creating a comprehensive suite of services for enterprise deployment and management of Apple products.
In addition to simplifying deployment, the new IBM services allow enterprises to easily manage ongoing support for Macs, providing OS and image management, software application and update management, an enterprise app catalog, automatic compliance and configuration updates for security, and inventory and reporting for hardware and software. Users also can access a range of self-help resources, including password reset, chat, and expert knowledge forums, as well as traditional help desk services.
These new mobility services for Mac join a growing list of enhanced IBM mobile enterprise services introduced by IBM last year. Those services include Infrastructure Development Services, Application Platform Management Services, Device Procurement and Deployment Services, Managed Mobility Services, Mobile Network Services, Mobile Collaboration Services, Mobile Virtualization, and IBM Smart and Embedded Device Security.
With these new services announced today, IBM is ideally suited to help enterprise clients who are running systems and applications across a range of platforms, with one of the broadest sets of technology services offerings across Windows, Linux, AIX, zOS, iOS, Android and now OS X.
About JAMF Software
Since 2002, JAMF Software—and the Casper Suite solution—have made it easy for businesses, schools and other enterprises to unleash the power of Apple devices in their organizations. Find out why more than 5,000 businesses and schools rely on JAMF Software to manage 4,400,000+ devices across the globe at www.jamfsoftware.com
For more information on IBM MobileFirst, visit the press kit or www.ibm.com/mobilefirst.
For more information about IBM GTS Mobility Services, visit: ibm.com/services/mobility.
Source: International Business Machines Corporation
MacDailyNews Take: Soon millions of corporate workers will look forward to coming to work so they can use the real thing, not the insecure, upside-down and backwards, ugly and frustrating knockoff to which they’ve been shackled for decades in a productivity-sapping living hell!
As we have always said, even as many short-sightedly waved (and continue to wave) the white flag, the war is not over. And, yes, we shall prevail… – MacDailyNews Take, January 10, 2005
SEE ALSO:
IBM helping other companies adopt Apple’s indomitable Macs – August 5, 2015
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
Apple ready for Prime Time.
Hmm, more like IBM is finally ready for prime-time.
Apple is bigger than ever but the software is no longer at its peak.
Not yet. Not by a long shot.
Just wait another year or two. Apple will invade corporations like never before, sell loony numbers of Macs and let people enjoy the bliss of an actually pleasant computing experience at work. Then they’ll do a FCPX/Aperture/iWork and grind thousands (millions?) of office pros’ work into a fine powder, then smile and tell them all to start from scratch.
Michael Blair, perma bear on Apple Inc., I hope you are iistening!!
Crap ! It use to be easy to integrate and deploy macs, now it is officially becoming more difficult. IT world will have there way !
It’s easy for one person. Gets messy with 10 or more. Controlling them used to be a beast but Macs are falling into line. Playing like PCs now.
i was managing over 300 macs back when 10.4 was all the fad.. so I don’t know where you get messy with 10 or more from.. google manages over 65 thousand macs and their team only has 7 people on it.. so maybe you’ve just been doing something wrong.
too bad casper is garbage.
hi seb. don’t worry casper is garbage. real men use Munki and Puppet.
-g
Good news!
Now maybe Apple will have to reexamine the function of the Green Full Screen button.
Full screen really frustrates office workers. This is by far the most common Mac complaint that I hear.
“Having switched the whole company I work for from Windows to Mac OS with over 200 Macs deployed I can say the only thing that annoys users is the fact the green button does not make a program go full screen WITH the dock still showing. Its my only annoyance too.
I don’t understand how trainees are getting the green button so wrong. We try to explain in training how you can have full screen apps in OS X and multiple desktops, but its just lost on them, they want the green button to act like Maximise does in Windows.”
What is needed is a Maximize OPTION.
There’s a certain irony that for years, users switching to Mac wanted a maximize button just like Windows (or Linux GUIs)… then Apple does this but goes too far and hides the Dock (analog to the Taskbar)… and the menu bar… and the GUI widget to get out of full screen, unless you hover in the menubar area.
One of the first rules of GUI design is to NOT hide critical control elements, but that’s exactly what Apple did. Scroll bars are another sore point: hiding these by default makes sense on a mobile or watch screen, but makes zero sense on a desktop with tons of screen real estate.
Apple is moving too aggressively along the UI spectrum, dismantling the apparatus item by item until it’s all gone—no interface required!
That’s a forced evolution that requires us to continually adapt, but some of us are not nearly ready for the human-machine symbiosis Apple seem to have in mind. I’m just as dubious about their tinkering with human nature as I am of Google’s.
Agree wit you on the disappearing scroll bars! Drives me bonkers.
Apple is so far from ready for this it’s not funny.
Keys to widespread corporate adoption:
Ubiquity. Consistency. Predictability. Transparency.
Apple has none of these qualities.
Just double click on the gray space at the top of the window to maximize the window are based on content.
I don’t like the misdirection of the green button either. The old way was better. I see no reason for full screen, except 1% of the time for media (movies).
Somewhere some Wall Street anal-yst/BS artist is going to use his imagination and creativity to figure out how to spin this negatively.
Wow – In 1998 I was working to get an Apple notebook integrated into an IBM environment. It was a difficult and hardly satisfactory situation. We got the email to work and not very good 3270 emulation. NO support from IBM.
How times have changed.
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I hear new music in the air!
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🎶♪♪♬♪♬👏🌞
They are going to have to play nicer with Citrix or Citrix has to play nicer with them. I’m an IBM employee and use the Citrix reader extensively and I’m told our Citrix environment doesn’t work well with a MBP.
I’ve used Citrix before and it wasn’t bad at all but that was two years ago. I have noticed that when I use Cisco AnyConnect VPN that accessing network file shares is painfully slow but if I use my Windows 7 virtual machine on the same Mac with VPN, it loads blazingly fast in comparison.
Hopefully IBM’s experience can put some pressure on various vendors to up their game and deliver a better quality experience.
“IBM today announced new cloud-based IT services to help clients quickly, easily and securely integrate Macs with their enterprise systems and applications.”
Big Brother goes Apple – over time Apple conquers all!