“This is the tool that people use eight hours a day. And it's important that people feel that we care about that and are working in the service of making things easier for them every day. Every minute that people spend struggling with some IT system is a minute taken away from the thing that they want to be doing”

Previn began the Mac at IBM program in March 2015. By 2017, he was promoted to CIO. Did the Mac at IBM program have anything to do with his promotion?

“Oh, well, you’ve got to be careful about cause and effect. But I think we did a lot of wonderful things for IBM and our users around the globe," he said.

Previn said he owes a lot of the success to the team he hired, and suggested anyone looking to transform their own IT services need to focus on people first.

“If someone asked how we got it done, and how they could do something similar in their organisation, my big advice would be getting the right talent. We specifically set out to recruit and hire the best people in the business. And I am very proud of the team that we've assembled; because a few talented, dedicated people can do amazing things. And you look at the size and scale of the IBM program and the relatively small number of engineers that work on it. It's a testament to the talent on that team.”

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So would should companies look for in the perfect IT candidate?.

“First and foremost, I think I'm looking for curiosity," Previn said. "Is a person really passionate about what they're doing? And are they driven by curiosity to learn more and always be taking new information in and always be learning?

“Close behind that is empathy and kindness, Do they have the ability to walk a mile in another person's shoes and understand their pain points and have a desire to fix those things.”

Previn was back at JNUC to update IBM’s numbers. Now the company has more than 277,000 Mac and iOS devices deployed, with a total of 78 dedicated Apple support staff.

But the big news and biggest cheers came when Previn announced IBM was open sourcing its tools for Mac administration. He said that IBM takes a pro developer, pro open source approach to things generally, but that part of his motivation for open sourcing IBM’s tools was to give back to the community.

Jamf Nation is little known outside of Apple admin circles, but as Jamf has become the defacto Apple management system, it has become an active support forum for IT professionals looking to integrate Apple hardware.

“If you go out to Jamf Nation and post a question, you'll get an answer within minutes, and it's probably the correct answer. You see this spirit of camaraderie and wanting each other to be successful,” Previn said.

“Jamf Nation is a very active and participatory community. And we've certainly benefited from that community over the last number of years since beginning a formal Mac program. And it was always an aspirational goal of ours to be able to return the favour and give back to that community. Open source was the next logical step.”

Open source software is going through a bit of a renaissance right now, with some of the biggest players opening their code to world. The fastest growing open source language is Swift, created by Apple. Google remains the the largest contributor to the online open source library, Github, followed closely by Microsoft, which is in the process of purchasing the repository.

“Hopefully, that continues to be a trend.” says Previn. “The water level rises for all parties when people contribute to open source.”