I recently had a conversation with ICT leaders in a large organisation that were committed to modernizing their endpoint management and being more endpoint agnostic. I admired their genuine commitment to look past the usual preconceptions relating to various OS common in Enterprise orgs and they aspired to creating a true Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model for the range of devices they would support across their users.
During the conversation, I was reminded of the presentation Cisco’s CIO Fletcher Previn gave at a recent Jamf JNUC conference in 2023 where he talked through the employee choice program he introduced, offering Mac to all employees across Cisco (see the YouTube video above). Digging up the presentation itself, I was pleased to see that Cisco now offer this TCO calculator free and open sourced on GitHub – you can access this yourself by clicking below:
Cisco’s TCO Calculator for Endpoints
If you want to download just the Excel calculator itself, you can grab it here:
If you watch the video above, you’ll see Fletcher give some more detailed breakdowns of TCO of Mac versus virtually every other common endpoint used in orgs (Windows, Linux, Windows VMs in the cloud) and I appreciated the agnostic approach to the TCO calculator that Cisco has taken. Their findings were interesting:
One area that was touched on in the presentation above was the adoption of biometrics by employees across Windows vs Mac (Windows Hello for Business vs TouchID):
There’s no obvious reason to me why this would be so different, and I’d certainly have some questions around configuration of WHfB at Cisco given this disparity (corporate policy could mandate the use of WHfB for example if you’re driving towards a passwordless environment as part of a zero trust strategy). In the video above, the CIO did say some feedback from users was they found WHfB complex / difficult to configure and perhaps didn’t trust how their biometric data was being used (likely misunderstanding of how their face is being used to unlock the device). Having worked at Microsoft for seven years as a Modern Workplace specialist I’ve configured Intune/EntraID and Windows to drive WHfB and as an employee this was the best, fastest and most secure way to log into my corporate PC so I am a bit surprised by the above finding.
A Mac choice program is one of the few things you can do that’s going to save money, make the head of HR happy, make the CFO happy and make employees more productive and happy.
Fletcher Previn (SVP & CIO @ Cisco)
Hybrid Worker Bundle
One other thing stuck out to me from the video above, the introduction by Cisco of the “Hybrid Worker Bundle” (click here to skip to the section of the video that talks about this). The idea was to make it easier for hybrid / remote workers to onboard as new employees. Taking some screen snips from the video you can see it contains a layered approach to what a new user would need:
- A box containing everything you need in ‘layers’
- The inside lid (and first thing seen) is the user’s employee badge (if they’re a new hire)
- The first layer is the user’s new MacBook + external keyboard and trackpad
- The next layer contains a Cisco security appliance and wireless access point to provide a managed network experience
- Finally, a Webex collaboration device called a Cisco Desk Pro is included that provides a second display for Webex calls to improve the end user experience.
My first impression was this is a very cool way to deliver a hybrid working experience to employees, one that is optimised for both security and performance, wrapped in a very ‘consumer’ like unboxing experience.
Cool stuff.
With the announcement of iOS support for Minecraft:Education Edition, it is continuing a theme of greater cross platform support from Microsoft for other OS in the Education Space.
