IBM is already the world's largest Mac adoption company with over 90,000 drives; announces its first educational app for iOS

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 equals three million in the real world, isn't it? The fact 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 Mac adoption.

Apple and IBM

In a talk at Jamf Nation User Conference, the vice president of Workplace as a Service (WaaS) from IBM, Fletcher Previn, said the computer giant already employs over 90,000 (!) Macs around the company, and the figure reaches 100,000 before the end of the year with that, IBM has by far It is the largest concentration of Apple computers in the business world. And considering that in October of last year this number was in the 30,000s, we can see how things are striding around there.

But numbers by numbers don't say much: IBM's true satisfaction is that Macs are much cheaper to maintain and provide their employees with a better experience, as has been seen before. Considering the entire universe of Apple products owned by its employees (ie 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 the tickets requesting technical assistance for PCs, 27% of them ended up requiring a face-to-face visit by professionals; j in the universe of Macs, only 5% of the tickets had this need. And, apparently, employees are also progressively learning to do better with their Ma machines: In the early days of the partnership, 7.6 percent of the 8,758 Mac employees asked for assistance; Last September, only 3.2% of the 85,000 employees equipped with them needed 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% still remain with OS X Yosemite.

According to Previn, a preliminary IBM estimate estimated that the cost of maintaining 100,000 Macs for four years is three times the cost of maintaining the same number of PCs over the same period. Lucky for them, then, is that 91 percent of employees are satisfied with their Apple devices and less than 1 percent switched their Macs to 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 for receiving a Windows machine, so you need to file an exception request. .

Can you 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 app, designed for teachers, is dedicated to providing a holistic, personalized view of their students, providing information that goes beyond quantified performance and enters areas such as interests, accomplishments and behavior.

https://www.youtube/watch?v=WV3xuGXeYN4

You can enter personalized information that can be shared with other teachers, allowing for more effective personal monitoring. In the app is also the help of IBM's own Watson Enlight cognitive tool that helps teachers create student-specific materials based on their profile.

IBM Watson Element for Educators are 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, no?

(via Apple World Today, 9to5Mac)