IBM seeing great returns on over 277,000 Macs and iOS devices issued to employees

During the annual jamf Nation User Conference, IBM made waves with the announcement that they are open sourcing their in-house Mac@IBM provisioning code that should fuel Mac deployments at other companies.

Fletcher Previn, IBM's CIO that was appointed roughly two years ago, was on stage at the conference to discuss how the deployment has gone since the landmark announcement that they would allow employees to choose between Macs and PCs in 2015.

Previn revealed that Macs make up 25 percent of IBM's 537,000 active laptops, with 150,000 new laptops provisioned each year. This is up from 85,000 in September of 2016.

Previn also shared details on the IBM's Employee Workstation Buyback Program. After four years, when their Macs are refreshed, employees have the opportunity to purchase their machines from the company at their current market price. Fletcher told AppleInsider that this program was not intended as a cost-saving measure, but as "the right thing to do" for their employees.

As a nice side effect for the company, they've seen reduced tickets for damaged machines now that employees see it as potentially their own. As the number of deployed Macs has risen, the number of support tickets has largely not normalizing at between two and five percent.

A team of only 78 deal with all Mac-related issues that arise. When a Mac issue does pop up, 91 percent are dealt with quickly within the first contact with IT, as compared to 86 percent on Windows 10 devices. Additionally, 14 percent of Windows 10 issues involves dispatching IT personal desk side, more than double the 6 percent of macOS issues that require it.

During his presentation Previn also outlined other optimizations IBM has made to help reduce the IT burden of such a growing number of machines, including leveraging its Watson AI technology.