jamf ibm case study

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How Jamf fits into the enterprise device management landscape

Should you consider jamf to manage your company’s apple devices here’s what you need to know..

Earlier this summer, Jamf — a Minneapolis company devoted to bridging the gap between Apple devices and the enterprise/education market — launched a successful IPO despite the pandemic. Once a niche player, the company has emerged as the go-to provider of management solutions that take over where Apple leaves off when it comes to Macs, iPads and iPhones in business (and education). As I noted two years ago , Jamf has become a de facto replacement for Apple’s enterprise support team, placing a strong emphasis on engaging with its customers.

For IT leaders, Jamf is a bit of an outlier. The company mostly resembles other enterprise mobility management (EMM) and unified endpoint management (UEM) firms, but with a catch. While EMM/UEM vendors typically support a wide swath of clients — anything from iOS and Android to Windows 10 and Chromebooks — Jamf has remained true to its roots in supporting only Apple devices. That contrasts sharply with platforms like VMware Workspace ONE, MobileIron, and Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

To some, Jamf is a confusing prospect and easily overlooked when evaluating EMM and UEM providers and platforms. Others see the company with a stigma lingering from the days when Macs weren’t really enterprise friendly, requiring a mess of  management tools that weren’t needed for Windows PCs; Jamf was one of several companies making those management and deployment tools.

While some of its compatriots have fallen by the wayside or expanded well beyond device management, Jamf has stayed in the same lane.

That strategy has paid off. The company has grown in recent years, both in headcount and in the functionality of its services, through internal product creation and via  acquisitions. Given the success of its IPO, it’s reasonable to presume it will continue to do so.

At the same time, Jamf has been developing strong relationships with major enterprise technology vendors like SAP and IBM — both of which offer Apple devices (managed using Jamf tools) to their employees and provide customers Apple-specific solutions, including standalone apps, APIs, services, workflows and best-practice guidance. If you doubt Jamf’s relationships and partnerships, check out the agenda for the company’s virtual Jamf Nation User Conference (JNUC) taking place this week.

With all the buzz about Jamf, it makes sense to learn more about it and whether its services are a good fit for your company. Here’s what you need to know.

Is Jamf an EMM service?

Yes and no. Like other enterprise mobility vendors, Jamf hooks into Apple’s mobile device management (MDM) framework for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and even Apple TVs. It also provides a comprehensive stable of products and services for connecting, managing, and protecting Apple devices in various business and education environments. That means, for the sake of a point-to-point comparison, yes, Jamf is both a mobility and endpoint management company.

But where most enterprise mobility companies want to service the broadest possible selection of devices across multiple platforms, and endpoint managers focus on managing every possible type of device (hence the term universal endpoint management ), Jamf is focused on expanding its relationship with Apple and gaining a deeper understanding of its customers and their needs — particularly in key verticals like education and healthcare. This makes the company more like a service provider or integration specialist than an EMM or UEM vendor.

Can Jamf be my only EMM provider?

This question gets to the heart of Jamf’s place in the broader enterprise ecosystem. The answer, in theory, is yes — but requires a specific set of conditions. The first and most obvious: you need to be an Apple-centric or all-Apple company. While that isn’t the most common of environments, many such organizations exist. Schools and small businesses are particularly likely to be Apple-only, while in larger enterprises, whole divisions, subsidiaries, and international offices may also present Apple-only environments — even if the overall organization predominantly uses Windows.

What about companies that are Windows-only on the desktop but want to securely manage a fleet of iPhones? This scenario also fits well in Jamf’s wheelhouse. Typically, Active Directory is used to manage the Windows PCs and services, and the iPhones can be managed for their entire lifecycle using tools from Jamf.

One of the biggest pieces of news for Jamf this month is that it has leveraged its relationship with Microsoft to amplify this existing ability. The result is a system where Microsoft Endpoint Manager handles secure authentication and compliance for iPhones, while all other configuration, management, and device security is handled by Jamf. This allows customers to apply key cloud-based security and functionality like Microsoft’s conditional access platform in a consistent way while also managing deployment and services from Jamf.

This relationship is remarkable in that it doesn’t require a one-size-fits-all approach. About a decade ago, it looked as though the variety of devices might not deliver on their unique characteristics because of a drive to manage them all as if they were PCs. Instead, enterprise computing has become incredibly robust, with not just iOS but also Android, Windows 10, Samsung Knox and Chrome OS in the mix — and with each platform able to make full use of its unique attributes.

That means most companies cannot rely on Jamf alone, because they have a heterogenous amalgam of endpoints that need to be secured, managed, and maintained. In addition to Macs, iPhones and iPads, that collection of devices might include everything from Windows PCs, Chromebooks, traditional workstations, and virtual DaaS desktops to Android devices across an ever-growing sea of manufacturers and versions, and even IoT and edge computing devices.

Boiled down, this means a mix of technologies from Microsoft, Google, Apple, and others needs to be considered. The challenge becomes more daunting if you are trying to battle shadow IT — users and managers building out their own mix of devices, cloud providers, and apps, typically without IT’s immediate awareness or control.

Can Jamf coexist with other enterprise tools?

Yes. Most IT leaders can remember “the Mac crew” in creative departments who essentially got their own mini IT departments that remained a complete island in a sea of Windows PCs. Virtually everything from app selection to deployment to help desk for Apple products was its own entity. In many cases, there was no option for running traditional enterprise tools like CRM and ERP systems on those Macs. Even where there was, it wasn’t uncommon to see the Mac users working with a completely different product from the Windows users. There was no real sense of integration with other members of the corporate team.

This can certainly still be the case, but as organizations become multi-platform, each device or OS becomes less important. The IT value today is in enabling business transformation and supporting digital initiatives. The real “platform” becomes the cloud solutions and collaboration products that enable business to move forward as quickly as possible. This requires a change in thinking: the device itself is irrelevant as long as  access to data, apps, and services is transparently available across platforms.

Jamf can integrate with other enterprise systems to make that possible.

Can’t I manage Apple devices using other EMM products?

Absolutely. Apple’s open MDM framework and related tools such as Apple Business Manager are available to all enterprise management companies; several have implemented those core features, most with support for additional platforms beyond Apple’s. Jamf’s capabilities continue beyond the core ability to configure, manage, and secure devices.

Jamf can be seen as a strong value-add that goes well beyond core requirements. This means if you already implement Apple device management via another EMM provider and rely on it for devices beyond Apple, such as Android devices, the two can coexist, and you can deploy them in parallel, allowing the most appropriate tool for each device or situation.

One significant way in which Jamf goes further than typical EMM providers is in its purpose-built solutions for specific types of organizations. During his JNUC keynote Tuesday morning, CEO Dean Hager offered several powerful testimonials from the healthcare frontlines and from school districts that have had to shift to distance learning. In education, he noted that Jamf took its existing classroom management tools and built out features for parents who now must facilitate learning at home.

Similarly, one of Jamf’s strongest benefits is that a Jamf deployment can be malleable to what’s needed by each organization. The company takes an active hand in understanding how its customers use its products and sharing that information. This allowed the company to help customers pivot very quickly at the beginning of the pandemic. Jamf’s user community is also one of the most active and invested out there; by itself, it’s almost a feature.

Competing with an entire IT stack

One of the challenges in the EMM landscape is that the major products come from companies that offer one-stop shopping for your entire IT stack. Microsoft, VMware, and Citrix, for example, all focus on being a complete solution, thus simplifying procurement decisions. Although you can implement them individually (VMware’s Workspace ONE without vSphere, its server virtualization platform, for example), the greatest overall IT value is often that coordinated product mix.

This presents both a problem and opportunity for standalone options, including Jamf (and MobileIron, another leading EMM vendor). The problem is that it’s just easier and cheaper to go with the full-stack approach. The opportunity lies in being able to perform specific operations better and to deliver measurable value.

That is where Jamf ultimately sits — as an add-on or part within a greater ecosystem. In that role, it can provide greater connective tissue with both integrations and how devices are used (as well as managed). Jamf doesn’t tick most of the EMM boxes, but those it does tick it does incredibly well. This often means that Jamf is seen as going head-to-head with your primary infrastructure provider, which often checks all the boxes to one degree or another, particularly where cost comes into question.

Is that value enough?

Ultimately, Jamf’s place within an IT deployment environment can be seen as a want , not a need , because other products look better on paper. The question then becomes whether or not that value is worth the cost — a decision that will vary profoundly from one organization to another.

The one piece of guidance I’d give on that question is to trial Jamf and determine via a center of excellence or pilot project what value it offers and whether or not it makes sense to build the case for expanding Jamf to a larger group or company-wide.

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Ryan Faas is a technology journalist and author who had been writing about Apple, business and enterprise IT topics, and the mobile industry for over a decade. He is author and/or editor of ten technology books. He is a prolific freelance writer whose work has been featured on Computerworld, Enterprise Mobile Today, InformIT, Peachpit Press, Cult of Mac, Cult of Android, About.com, and Datamation. In 2008 he was awarded a Neal National Business Journalism award for his work featured in Computerworld's "Week of Leopard" series.

In addition to writing, Ryan has spent a large portion of the past fifteen years in the systems/network engineering and IT management fields as an IT director, systems administrator, trainer, and all round multi-platform and mobile device technology consultant. His client list ranges from human services agencies, small non-profits, and private schools to fortune 500 hundred companies and major media agencies. He also worked for mobile management provider MobileIron from November 2014 until October 2015.

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Using Jamf Pro and MDM for Schools

John Wetter is the Technical Services Manager at  Hopkins Public Schools  in Michigan, a network of four schools that services grades K through 12 in the Hopkins school district. While attending the  Jamf Nation User Conference  (JNUC) in 2015, he was inspired enough by what he saw to put it into action, rethinking their student device deployment workflow to great success.

Recognizing the value in time savings as well as ease and convenience for the end user (in this case, students), he applied IBM’s agile strategies to his own IT ecosystem. By automating their device deployment workflow, he was able to deliver 500 iPads at the start of the school year, successfully supplying 93% of the district student population with the technology and software they needed to hit the ground running by the third day of classes.

In addition to student support, Wetter’s new Jamf Pro deployment enables streamlined recruitment and training processes, leveraging automation to add value, save time, and define new user satisfaction metrics to great success.

Knowing this flash of brilliance would be of great interest to other education IT managers, Wetter produced a  webinar  in conjunction with Jamf in which he shares his experience.

Here are some of the key takeaways from that webinar:

1. rethinking how success is measured.

Wetter’s previous methodology used KPIs to define how well they were doing on the tech side of things, mostly focusing on measuring things like time to resolution for help desk tickets and other metrics they could place on a timeline. Post-JNUC, the way in which they looked at end-users completely changed, switching to a customer service model as opposed to seeing them as students, staff, and faculty. Though there were some trepidations at the outset, they were soon seeing positive scores in the 95% range, a significant increase over their previous methodology.

2. Nurturing the human side of IT

Particularly noteworthy were the changes that Wetter initiated in HPS’s hiring process. In the past, hiring dedicated technical staff was necessary to help troubleshoot apps, device issues, updates, password resets, and so on in their iPad program. Under this methodology, it was a prerequisite for candidates to have strong tech skills. As they morphed to the customer service-driven model, they aligned their priorities accordingly, choosing instead to hire employees with strong communication skills and then bringing them up to speed with the technology on-the-job. In order to have access to top talent in this area, they opened up the schedule to allow for more flexibility and began to onboard new hires in the summer to get them comfortable with the workflows before students arrived in the fall.

3. Automate whenever possible

One of the most exciting takeaways HPS gleaned from this transition was the automation of repetitive tasks. For instance, one component of the iPad program was that parents and students were required to sign an agreement upon accepting their devices – a manual process that was both cumbersome and time-consuming. Leveraging the Jamf Pro API and Google Sheets, parents were now able to sign the permission slip with one click in a Google Form, which would then trigger the API to provision the device.

Lessons learned

HPS now offers enterprise-grade customer support and empowers students, parents, and staff alike with a better learning and technology experience than was previously possible – and they did so with roughly half the budget they had previously required.

If you are using Apple technology to power your business and are interested in learning more about Jamf Pro or other managed services, jump on a call with Interlaced. We are the industry’s most operationally mature Managed Service Provider dedicated to working with Apple-focused businesses, and we would love to tell you how we can help you get the most out of your technology.

Jeff Gaines

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DevOps case study: why we have DevOps at JAMF Software

This is a guest post from DevOps Manager Michael Kren and is this first in a blog series about how he started a culture of DevOps at JAMF Software, how he built his team and the tools he used. His entire DevOps journey is collected in an ebook, which is available for download. Read on and check out the ebook!

This is a guest post from Michael Kren. Michael is a DevOps Manager at JAMF Software, which makes software that helps IT teams manage their Apple devices. This begins a blog series about how he started a culture of DevOps at JAMF Software, how he built up the team, and what tools they use.

When I was first hired in 2012, DevOps wasn’t even a thing yet, or at least not at JAMF. I came onboard to assist the engineering team with infrastructure deployment and maintenance, and had just one build server, a handful of developers, and a couple QA folks.

The first few changes worked, for the most part, but we still struggled with inefficiencies. At JAMF Software, we’re all about device management and helping IT do more with less. We make products like Casper Suite , which allows IT personnel to manage thousands of devices from a single web server – so we’re big on efficiency and scalability.

I started looking around for ways to make our team more agile and responsive. Our biggest challenge? We were painfully slow. We could code fast, but we had to “hurry up and wait” for testing and building.

We had other challenges, too – in the ebook I go into more detail about how DevOps helped us overcome them. For now, let’s just say that we knew we could be serving customers even better, and we needed a stronger set of processes and technologies to get us there.

How does DevOps fit in?

That’s the exact question I started with at JAMF. I’d heard a bit about DevOps from friends and colleagues, but wasn’t sure where or how to start.

After a bit of research, I was sold.

Right away, I liked that DevOps centered on improving the relationship and collaboration between developer and IT operations teams. We definitely needed that, to speed up and be able to deliver faster, high quality updates continuously to our customers. The end game of every DevOps practice is continuous delivery: building, testing, and releasing far more frequently, and ensuring that you can release reliably at any time.

My favorite part: it means that operations and support teams (like my Tech Comms team) use many of the same processes and tools as our developers do – so we all speak a similar language, follow similar workflows (like agile development processes), and work very closely together. It’s far more efficient.

A new culture

As a result of transforming our processes, everyone became an owner. Everyone was responsible for the end goal. Engineers now have a commitment to higher quality code, and infrastructure and operations felt responsible for incidents and ensuring that they close the loop. There are no more silos of information and work, and teams readily share successes and failures with one another. Finally, teams are more autonomous. Long decision making processes no longer hampered length of time to make mission critical decisions.

DevOps is good for your customers, too. Really good.

At JAMF, we’re always asking, “How does this help the customer?” We even send our engineering team on customer site visits, for professional development – and in the process, it shows the customer the “face behind the code” and strengthens our relationships.

By adopting DevOps practices at JAMF, our customers have enjoyed:

• Truly continuous software delivery.
• They get new stuff all the time, not once every quarter – and they get fixes and patches in minutes or days, not weeks or months.
• Far faster resolution of problems they do encounter.

Before DevOps, we didn’t have a great system for easily rolling back new code changes – or for swarming the right resources around an incident to resolve it faster. We’ve also enjoyed spending far more time developing, and far less time fixing things, which not only keeps our customers happier, but our team members, too.

Adopting DevOps wasn’t rocket science, but it wasn’t just “flipping a switch” either. It required a commitment to making some big changes in how we work, and overcoming the natural resistance to change that’s inevitable. In my next two blog posts, I’ll touch on what I believe are the most critical components of going from zero to DevOps at JAMF: building the right culture, and choosing the right tools.

Want the full story? I cover all the details of the journey to DevOps at JAMF Software in the ebook. Download it for free by clicking on the big green button below!

Read the ebook

Did you find this post useful? Share it on your social network of choice so others can learn more about how to start thinking about DevOps at their company!

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IBM's 200,000 Macs have made a happier, more productive workforce

Mac@IBM kicked off in 2015

Last updated 4 years ago

In the study presented on Tuesday, IBM says that employees that used Mac machines were 22 percent more likely to exceed expectations in performance reviews compared to Windows users. Mac-using employees generating sales deals have 16% larger proceeds as well.

"The state of IT is a daily reflection of what IBM thinks and feels about its employees," said Fletcher Previn, CIO, IBM. "I've said it before - when did it become OK to live like the Jetsons at home but the Flintstones at work? We aim to create a productive environment for IBMers and continuously improve their work experience, and that's why we introduced our employee-choice program to IBM employees in 2015."

Turning to employee satisfaction, the first-of-its-kind study shows that Mac users were 17 percent less likely to leave IBM compared to their Windows counterparts. Mac users also were happier with the software available, with 5 percent asking for additional software compared to 11 percent of Windows users.

Previn touched on the cost to support the Macs in the workplace. A team of seven engineers is needed to maintain 200,000 Macs whereas a team of 20 is needed for that number of Windows PCs.

During setup, the migration process was simple for 98 percent of Mac users versus only 86 percent of those moving from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Windows users were also five times as likely to need on-site support.

Earlier this year Jamf released a study that showed reliability was the number one reason users preferred to work on a Mac rather than a PC.

IBM has made a number of announcements at JNUC in the past. Last year at JNUC 2018 , Previn announced the computing behemoth was open-sourcing its Mac@IBM provisioning code as well as the huge returns it saw with its Mac deployment.

The Mac@IBM program kicked off in 2015 where IBM was deploying 1,900 Mac devices per week supported by only 24 help desk staff members.

46 Comments

As we all already could have predicted but nice to see in print.

Whoa. Windows@IBM users were about 500% more likely to need migration assistance just within Windows. That stat blows me away. This in a workforce of 381,100 is a feather in Apple’s cap. Goodonya folks. ( https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/number-of-employees )

❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

AppleInsider said: ... employees that used Mac machines were 22 percent more likely to exceed expectations in performance reviews compared to Windows users. Employees generating sales deals has 16% larger proceeds from Mac users as well. ... I guess having read enumerable medical studies proving that black is white and the sun rises in the west, and having started as an accountant fully cognizant of the truth behind the saying that:  "Figures lie and liars figure", I have become quite cynical of statistics -- particularly those that fail the smell test. In the case of medical studies it has become generally accepted in the medical community that the primary determinant of the outcome of a study is who funded the study.   And, we all know about accountants and lawyers... This one fails the smell test.  It reeks of using statistics to prove a point. Are Macs better in the business environment?   Very likely -- particularly if you it's a favorable environment.   But, these stats sound highly suspicious to me.

GeorgeBMac said: AppleInsider said: ... employees that used Mac machines were 22 percent more likely to exceed expectations in performance reviews compared to Windows users. Employees generating sales deals has 16% larger proceeds from Mac users as well. ...

This isn't new news and has been quantified before. IBM has done their own studies and thus are not funded like drug manufacturers do for their studies: https://www.cio.com/article/3133945/ibm-says-macs-save-up-to-543-per-user.html https://www.businessinsider.com/an-ibm-it-guy-macs-are-300-cheaper-to-own-than-windows-2016-10

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Digital Office Company (DOC), a Finland-based provider of information management solutions and services, helps businesses find and manage large swaths of documents at speed and scale by enabling them to identify, classify and extract insights from their documents.

Most often, automated document classification systems provide superficial insight into the nature of documents through generic tags or metadata enrichments. This superficial classification doesn’t fully take into account the contents of the document itself, meaning that the true value of the data cannot be leveraged unless each document is manually evaluated.

The bottom line is that such a process of manual evaluation of documents to identify document types, detect misplaced documents and extract crucial details would be very laborious and time consuming. Moreover, lack of proper metadata handling poses potential GDPR concerns and negatively affects data quality for down-stream tasks. Unresolved, such challenges can threaten the competitive edge and efficiency of DOC’s customers because of these data quality and regulatory compliance issues.

To tackle these hurdles, DOC collaborated with the IBM Ecosystem Engineering Build Lab, IBM Client Engineering and IBM Technology Expert Labs to develop a pilot that leverages a combination of traditional machine learning and generative AI—large language models (LLMs)—with IBM® watsonx.ai™ and IBM Watson® Discovery .

Through a 6-week co-creation pilot, DOC developed an IBM Watson Discovery platform-powered data pipeline solution that uses custom machine learning models alongside Mistral AI’s Mixtral-8x7B LLM to classify documents with custom labels and metadata tags. The focus of the pilot was set on the real estate industry because of the variety of data types and regulatory requirements faced by DOC’s customers in this domain. This industry focus led to the creation of an additional capability that expanded the scope of the solution—using LLMs to extract rich insights such as board decisions from meeting minutes documents.

The pilot proved to be highly successful in terms of the increases in speed and quality of document classification and insights of large volumes of documents. In addition, the results of the pilot provide a clear indication of the benefits of a combined approach of traditional machine learning and generative AI, in which the shortcomings of each approach are covered by the strengths of the other. What used to take an individual a few minutes to manually look through a document and classify it can take just 2 seconds per document through an automated process that requires a human evaluation only for documents that are flagged as outliers by the system.

Looking ahead, DOC aims to expand on this pilot by further developing its solution to expand it to other industries and customer segments.

Digital Office Company (DOC) (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a Finland-company founded in 1996 that offers modern information management solutions for organizations of different sizes. Offices are located in Espoo, Hämeenlinna, Lahti and Lappeenranta, Finland.