At the current Jamf enterprise conference, Walmart hinted at plans for a wider launch of Apple Macs to its retail outlets and workers. Addressing attendees, Walmart’s technical guru for Apple products, Miles Leacy, stated that the company was working with Jamf and Apple to expand Mac usage.
At the moment Walmart already uses around 7,000 Macs internationally. The firm said that by this time next year it could be managing as many as 100,000 Macs – although Leacy’s statement made this look more like an optimistic estimate than anything concrete.
Leacy added: “In a few months we are going to announce the choice program for employees. Working with Jamf and Apple to get it done.”
When it comes to choosing between a PC and a MAC for corporate use, Leacy said it was difficult to deny the facts. The cost for Walmart to own a Mac is much less than that of owning a PC, he claimed, while the number of support calls was also much lower for Macs than for PCs.
With Walmart’s slogan being ‘Everyday Low Cost’, Leacy went on to say that they were always studying the total cost of ownership of any technology they employed, and at this stage, Macs were simply cheaper to own and operate than Windows PCs.
One of the statistics he quoted in support of this view was that only 40% of support calls IT received were from Mac users, while 60% came from PC users.
During recent years, Apple’s efforts to penetrate the business market have been very successful. The company worked with IBM to issue Macs to tens of thousands of its workers – 100,000 to be precise. That worked out well for IBM, who still seems very happy with the joint venture.
In the past, Apple has also cooperated with SAP to develop tools to make it easier to program business software.