IBM Open Sources Mac@IBM Code (9to5mac.com)

PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from 9to5Mac: At the Jamf Nation User Conference, IBM has announced that it is open sourcing its Mac@IBM provisioning code. The code being open-sourced offers IT departments the ability to gather additional information about their employees during macOS setup and allows employees to customize their enrollment by selecting apps or bundles of apps to install.

Back in 2015, IBM discussed how it went from zero to 30,000 Macs in six months. In 2016, IBM said Apple products were cheaper to manage when you looked at the entire life cycle: "IBM is saving a minimum of $265 (up to $535 depending on model) per Mac compared to a PC, over a 4-year lifespan. While the upfront workstation investment is lower for PCs, the residual value for Mac is higher The program's success has improved IBM's ability to attract and retain top talent -- a key advantage in today's competitive market."

Comments

OK this its opensource-ed config recipes only

[Anonymous Coward]

Applause to IBM opensource-ing their mac config recipes but is the recipes only. Appears to me that the actual runtime that executes and applies the config recipes is commercial proprietary config management & deployment suite called Jamf Pro.
See https://www.jamf.com/products/jamf-pro/
and https://github.com/IBM/mac-ibm-enrollment-app/

In light of config management via actual FOSS runtimes (Puppet/Chef/Ansible/Salt), this seems like a thinly veiled advert for Jamf Pro.

Re:OK this its opensource-ed config recipes only

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want a great alternative to Jamf Pro, look at Munki.
It was developed by Walt Disney Animation Studios and open sourced for everyone to use. It does just about everything that Jamf Pro does, with the added bonus of being open source and very well supported by the authors of the software and the community in general.

I'm going to have to take a look at IBM's framework and see how tightly it's tied to Jamf, or if I could drop Munki in at the back end instead.

Re:OK this its opensource-ed config recipes only

[torkus]

Very thinly veiled indeed.

With that said, Jamf is pretty awesome but needs to be customized. What IBM turned over is immensely helpful to medium and large enterprise for managing their Macs. I'm not a huge fan of several companies managing to advertise together in one post tho.

TBH anyone who manages Mac either has this kind of propaganda success story or reality. Yeah, your support costs are 'lower' because 1) you spent a lot of time and effort to build self-service infra from the ground up in an actual user-friendly way and 2) most of the support cost is pushed back on the end user.

Oh, your Mac crashed? Ok, check the knowledge base wiki that's maintained largely by other users. Ok, looks like you need to do an internet recovery, re-provision, restore your apps, restore your data, etc. It might be somewhat streamlined but the effort still exists. They're just having "not IT" people do it, typically with far less efficiency.

Apple isn't quite actively hostile to enterprise, but they certainly do not operate the same way enterprise expects from every other vendor ever.