Jamf Casper compared to other Mac management solutions

@Matt Yep, it's the biggest reason I turned down an offer last August in Northern California. At our face to face meeting, the CTO's "We want to use our PC solution to manage the Macs" was enough for me to decline. Speaking candidly, the CTO explained his wrists were tied by the CFO, and so he was expecting 2 years of trying/failing before the Firm could spend money on Casper. He wanted the industry standard tool (Casper) but it was not the right time. When it comes to very large, publicly traded companies, the politics can be incredibly nonsensical. One person's bottom line, and their potential bonus (business sense?!) trumps common sense.

We tried Altiris at Polo some years ago, after a 2 year contract to get them moved from OS 9 to OS X. I declined their full time offer when they refused to look at best-of-breed tools at the time, convinced that Altiris can do it all. Of course it couldn't, and still can't, but someone walked away with a nice bonus after the dust settled there too I'm sure. My successor @milesleacy got them to buy Casper and turned that ship around and is now teaching for JAMF. So things eventually take a turn for the best. :D

Does anyone have any input comparing JAMF with AirWatch as it relates to managing Mac OS X?

We have both AW and Jamf, though I never really compared the two, I know AW is trying to handle managing the macs. I don't beleive that they are a full deployment suite in the way that JAMF is. AW will do config profiles and tracking and stuff, the same way that JAMF does, but JAMf is also package management, deployment, patching, and everything else.

I should probably have a meeting with our AW reps to see what they are currently able to do, so I can compare against JAMF in better detail.

Charles,

Give this a read,

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=13515

I'm reviving this.thread as well as that.thread mentioned by @gachowski .

Parallels has announced version 6 of their Mac management product. They're making very bold claims about using SCCM as "the single pane of glass" to manage and get reporting on Macs via SCCM.

As Macs are still the minority platform in most companies, we need to "know the enemy" in order to understand what it can do (and what it can't).

http://www.parallels.com/products/mac-management/

Also it looks like AirWatch is trying to work with it's users, they did not work with our phone team.....

http://blog.eriknicolasgomez.com/2017/03/08/Custom-DEP-Part-1-An-Introduction/

It's not that there aren't other macOS products in the enterprise. Some are even good. What (to me) sets JAMF apart from every other one of them is this community. There is nothing out there like jamfnation.