Let’s think about this title for a second, and then go back 32 years in time to conclude: three decades in the technological world are equivalent to three millennia in the real world, right? The fact is that IBM announced yesterday that the fruits of the partnership with Apple are going very well, thank you, and the company is already the largest in the world in terms of adoption of Macs.
Speaking at Jamf Nation User Conference, the vice president of Workplace as a Service (WaaS) from IBM, Fletcher Previn, said the computing giant already employs more than 90,000 (!) Macs around the company, and the number will reach 100,000 before the end of the year – with that, IBM has, by far , the largest concentration of Apple computers in the business world. And considering that in October of last year this number was in the 30,000 range, we can see how things are moving at a fast pace there.
But numbers by numbers don’t say much: IBM’s real satisfaction is that Macs are much cheaper to maintain and provide a better experience for its employees, as noted earlier. Considering the entire universe of Apple products belonging to its employees (that is, including iPhones and iPads on the cake), the number of units reaches 217,000; still, a team of just 50 people supports all of these products worldwide.
The thing goes further: among tickets requesting technical assistance for PCs, 27% of them ended up requiring a face-to-face visit by professionals; in the Macs universe, only 5% of tickets presented this need. And, apparently, employees are also progressively learning to do better with their Apple machines: in the early days of the partnership, 7.6% of the 8,758 employees with Macs asked for assistance; last September, only 3.2% of the 85,000 employees equipped with them need help from IT staff.
Overall, IBM needs to support Macs 104 times less (!) Than Windows machines. Within the company, 33% of Macs are already running macOS Sierra, while 47% are on OS X El Capitan and another 20% are still on OS X Yosemite.
According to Previn, a preliminary calculation by IBM estimated that the cost of maintaining 100,000 Macs for four years is three times less than that of maintaining the same number of PCs in the same period. Lucky for them, then, that 91% of employees are satisfied with their Apple devices and less than 1% traded their Macs for PCs; even luckier to find that 73% of the workforce wants their next computer to be a Mac. And at IBM in Japan, for example, the Mac has already become the standard computer – to receive a Windows machine, you need to open an order exception.
Imagine when the new ones come?
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Another very interesting fruit of Apple’s partnership with IBM is being announced this week: the iPad app IBM Watson Element for Educators, the first educational app of the initiative MobileFirst for iOS.
The application, aimed at teachers, is dedicated to offering a personalized and holistic view of its students, offering information that goes beyond quantified performance and goes into areas such as interests, achievements and behavior.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV3xuGXeYN4
It is possible to enter personalized information that can be shared with other teachers, allowing more effective personal monitoring. There is also, in the app, the help of the cognitive tool Watson Enlight, from IBM itself, which will help teachers create specific materials for each student based on their profile.
IBM Watson Element for Educators is already in use at a Texas school, and will now be included in Apple’s portfolio of educational tools to be offered to schools worldwide. Interesting, isn’t it?
[via Apple World Today, 9to5Mac]
