See how Bleacher Report won the Apple device management game by empowering employees and automating IT workflows.
January 31 2018 by
My saga of Jamf and Bleacher Report begins many, many years ago when I was the only IT person for a medium-sized company. I wanted to find ways I could automate my daily routines, so I scoured the interwebs looking for answers. I ran across Jamf in a blog post and remembered a previous co-worker of mine also worked for Jamf. The information was insightful and prompted me to pick the brains of fellow IT professionals to see what they knew about the company. Numerous conversations later, I concluded that we needed Jamf.
Pitching Jamf to my employers
Every place I've worked since then I’ve pleaded for Jamf. Unfortunately, I’ve always come up empty. Then I started working for Bleacher Report. I was IT employee number one and was given the opportunity to build the department from scratch. On my third day, I reached out to Jamf to get their sales pitch and see what they could do for me. After that, I had no doubt they would help. That started my two-and-a-half-year conquest of getting Bleacher Report to purchase Jamf Pro.
I submitted multiple proposals, and after having several managers come and go, I was finally able to convince the powers that be that we could not live without Jamf. We hired a second IT administrator to work from our New York location by this time (Bleacher Report IT employee #2), so I also had to convince him that it was necessary.
InfoSec going to bat for Jamf
The final piece to this overly drawn out mobile device management (MDM) puzzle was that our parent company’s InfoSec team was willing to finance our first year’s worth of Jamf Pro. They wanted me to push out some security software to all our machines. I said I could do it, but it would take a very long time, since I would have to do it one machine at a time. Knowing full well I might be able to leverage Jamf for this task, they agreed to finance our first year of Jamf Pro. Once I relayed that information to our COO and CFO, the deal was sealed. Then we anxiously waited for our JumpStart and deployment.
Winning the device management game
Both myself and my New York counterpart attended what was then the Jamf CCT training (now Jamf 200). After completing the course, it was clear my colleague drank the Jamf Kool-Aid. Now we are both constantly surprised by the power that Jamf Pro allows us to wield. We automated and wrangled our computer and iOS inventory, greatly decreased our provisioning and on-boarding times for new computers, and we’re constantly creating new policies that make our jobs easier and more efficient.
Jamf Pro is now Bleacher Report IT employee #3.
Thomas Cosby is the IT Operations Engineer at Bleacher Report
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