Walmart plans to add employee Macs to reduce costs

Walmart hopes to cut costs by offering its employees Macs.

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Walmart has long trumpeted the cost savings it offers customers. Now the retail giant is hoping to save itself some money by offering Apple Macs as part of its employee computer choice program.

Walmart offered a peek at the program Wednesday during the Jamf Nation User Conference, one of the largest gatherings of Apple system administrators in the world. Walmart currently has 7,000 Mac computers distributed globally, but that's about to change, according to Miles Leacy, technical expert for Apple technologies at Walmart.

"This time next year we will probably be managing 100,000 Macs," Leacy told the JNUC crowd. A deciding factor in the expansion is the cost of IT support for employees.

With the announcement, Walmart is taking a page out of IBM's playbook. Leacy said IBM's presentation at a previous JNUC caught his eye. During that presentation, Fletcher Previn, now the CIO for IBM, discussed the cost savings the tech giant experienced after deploying 100,000 Macs to its employees.

Leacy said that about 60 percent of all support issues are related to Windows PCs, compared with 40 percent related to Macs.

"We looked at TCO [total cost of ownership] for our technology," Leacy said. "The cost of deploying and securing [a Mac] at this point is a lot cheaper than supporting a Windows box -- it just makes good business sense."

Walmart expects to officially announce its employee Mac choice program in the coming months.

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