IBM became Apple’s largest corporate customer this year when it agreed to buy 50,000 MacBooks from Apple, but according IBM’s chief information officer Jeff Smith, the company will more likely end up purchasing between 150,000 to 200,000 Macs when all is said and done.
In an internal IBM video, Smith describes how he and Apple CIO Niall O’Connor struck the deal that will see 50-75% of IBM’s workforce switching from Lenovo ThinkPads to Macs. Apparently that’s not good enough for Tim Cook though, who asked IBM VP Fletcher Previn, “well, what about the other third?” when the company told the Apple CEO of the massive bulk order they were planning.
Watch the video below:
Despite being bitter rivals the past three decades, Apple and IBM have forged strong partnership over the last year in an effort to increase both company’s presence in the enterprise market. IBM employs nearly 380,000 people worldwide. so if the deal does go through it would make the company nearly 10 times bigger than Apple’s current largest corporate customer, which purchases about 25,000 Macs.
Source: MacRumors
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
4 responses to “IBM’s bulk buy of 200,000 Macs isn’t enough for Tim Cook”
First off, IBM has about 400,000 employees, but they are going to be laying off some of them. Now, companies would be absolutely stupid to replace 100% of their install base at one time. It usually has to be phased. I used to work for a top large reseller that had a lifecycle practice and under best practices, it was actually recommended to replace computers on a 1/3, 1/3, and 1/3 that way they can have a planned roll out strategy and because they usually wrote down desktops/laptops over the course of 3 years. I think Apple getting an initial 200,000 unit PO is just fine. It’s a major start. Also, are they still going to use Windows in addition to OS X? That wasn’t mentioned in the article.
In addition, not all IBM employees may even need a desktop/laptop. Look at Apple, they have about 100,000 employees and not all employees get a computer, etc. What do Apple Store employees use? they typically use an iPhone or iPad.
If they get bored of their windows computers, they could always install Boot Camp and load Windows compatible on Mac.
That pic never gets old :’)
Camera recording a video. Classic. Versus using a screenshot recorder on the computer to copy the video.