Jamf acquires ZuluDesk

[deanhager]

Hello Jamf Nation!

As you may have heard, today Jamf announced our acquisition of ZuluDesk, a Netherlands-based provider of Apple-focused education technology. After having completed our most successful year ever in both the enterprise and education markets, Jamf is doubling down on its commitment to education. Combined with ZuluDesk, Jamf is the clear Apple education technology leader, serving more than 14,000 schools managing over 9 million Apple devices, including most of the largest districts in the United States.

The acquisition of ZuluDesk arms Jamf with a broader set of Apple education technology, enabling us to offer purpose-built solutions to best serve schools of any size and complexity. It is important for everyone to note that both Jamf Pro and ZuluDesk will receive significant additional investment, development and support. Specifically, Jamf Pro will gain a broader set of capabilities that benefit teachers and students, as Jamf plans to leverage ZuluDesk technology to launch teacher and parent apps for Jamf Pro in the future. Further, within a few months, Jamf will launch ZuluDesk branded as a Jamf product. At that point, both Jamf Pro and the newly Jamf-branded ZuluDesk solution will be sold and supported directly by Jamf, as well as resellers. Customer requirements, complexity, and preference will determine which Jamf products are implemented for each school.

Jamf's goal is to provide every student with the best possible learning opportunity. We believe we can accomplish this by empowering teachers to better leverage Apple's App Store, the best library of education technology content in the world. Today's acquisition is a step toward fulfilling this purpose for all schools world-wide.

In summary, there are no immediate changes to product, sales, support or operations. Both Jamf and ZuluDesk will operate as they have in the past. You will have the same contact and team, pursuing the same mission, with products that will receive increased investment for you.

For more information on the acquisition, check out the news release: https://www.jamf.com/resources/press-releases/jamf-doubles-down-in-education-acquiring-zuludesk-a-le...

Have a great day!

Dean

[ThijsX]

@deanhager and jamf folks! Congratulations with the acquisition!

[Matt_Roy93]

YAYYYY!!!

[sskelton68]

I just switched this year at our school from Jamf to Zuludesk. Does this mean our cost will be going back up?

[diradmin]

Hoping to continue to see the same level of investment and commitment to Jamf's Enterprise customers as well.

[retroroscoe]

I think that something needs to be done about the cost to educational institutions especially in non-US markets like Australia.
Getting seat pricing like $18 per device when you have 2000 devices starts getting really expensive. I am a loyal JAMF customer and would love to make JNUC one day. Swear by JamfPRO and happily recommend it to anyone, but the pricing is getting very frustrating.

[luis_silva]

@sskelton68 No. :)

[afarnsworth]

As long as the acquisitions don't turn have Jamf turn into a product like Ivanti EPM where it's just a mess of spaghetti code that works half the time. I am all for it!

[TaiwanBrown]

Very Cool, Congrats!

[grahamrpugh]

I understand that ZuluDesk is an MDM server, in addition to providing the two apps mentioned. That makes it very similar to Jamf Now, and aimed at a similar market.

It doesn’t seem sensible to maintain three MDM solutions in a single company (even if Facebook maintain three separate IM apps :) ).

So will one be ditched? Which one?

[jonohayes]

@grahamrpugh Jamf Now is a cloud MDM for business and wasn't designed for Education (bushel was also acquired a few years back). ZuluDesk is a Cloud MDM for Education. The ZuluDesk team have a cloud MDM for business 'Xinca', customers using Xinca will be move to Jamf Now.

This make a lot of sense for Jamf as they don't really offer true cloud MDM for education, their cloud Jamf Pro is just a fancy VM in the cloud hosted on AWS.

With ZuluDesk we get multi tenant support for resellers (this means I can manage all my schools, have templates across all my customers and get alerts etc). Hopefully we see the same with Jamf Now after this acquisition?

This will put Jamf in a good position moving forward:
Jamf Pro - Onsite MDM for enterprise and higher education
ZuluDesk - Cloud MDM for education
Jamf Now - Cloud MDM for business

I'm a little bit disappointed that Jamf is killing off Xinca when its feature set is 100x better than Jamf Now, why not just rebrand Xinca and move Jamf Now into it?

Features missing from Jamf Now that are in Xinca:
- Customer management for resellers
- LDAP
- Google LDAP
- Custom profile upload
- Onsite cache server for in-house packages and documents - App profile / custom settings
- VPN configurations
- SAML single sign-on
- API
- Apple TV support

Features missing from Xinca that are in Jamf Now:
- Interface is slightly better "cleaner"