My first Jamf referral

What’s your Jamf story? Having been a customer for more than a decade, it’s a question I like to ask. Because, more often than not, it has an interesting answer. My Jamf story started in an upstairs party room of a bar in San Francisco. It was the Macworld Expo, and counting Jamf employees, there were about 50 of us in the space watching the first public demo of Casper version 5.0.

Fast forward 13 years. A lot has changed with Jamf. It’s hard to keep up, but now they have more than 1,200 employees, 35,000 global customers, and they’re managing more than 15 million Apple devices. But even with all that growth, one thing has remained constant — being a Jamf customer is a special experience. And Jamf is, hands down, one of the best partners we could have.

I submit for proof the very first email referral I gave for Jamf. The date was Jan 28, 2009. You might recognize some of the names: Zach Halmstad and Chip Pearson (Jamf co-founders); Jason Wudi (Chief Technology Officer); Sam Johnson (Chief Customer Officer); Paul “Gus” Gustafson (the “father of the JAMF Nation” in the form of his newsletter emails); Nick Amundsen (VP of Product Strategy) and many more of the early Jamfs. The message is 11 years old. And though the name changed from Casper to Jamf, the sentiment is still the same, “BUY IT TODAY!”

Susan,

My recommendation is "BUY IT TODAY!"

We had been running the Radmind server for years here at ASU, and prior to that we did a hybrid of Mike Bombich's NetRestore server. And before that, we did the old Firewire HD clones. Casper Suite is by far the best solution out there for Macs.

The JumpStart was perfect. I consider myself a very knowledgeable Mac Admin, and I hate to pay for 'help' only to have the help come in and know less than I do. Not the case with JAMF. Our JumpStart service tech, Wudi, knew his stuff and we were imaging labs by the second day. We used the third day to fine tune our servers and Netboot environment for the JSS and to train our campus techs on the system. That is true of everyone I have dealt with at JAMF. They know their product inside out, and more so they know the Mac platform inside out. Most of them came from the field and know the real world support issues we deal with everyday, especially in higher ed.

And service is outstanding. All the way from decision making, talking to Chip, through purchasing with Amy and Gus, JumpStart with Wudi and support with a number of folks (Zach, Sam, Tedd, Ben, Jake, Nick, Erin) every step has felt more like colleagues than a company. It feels like JAMF works for ASU when we need them. Support is always immediate. Emails and calls are answered right away. They always follow up and make sure our fix worked. And they listen to us when we suggest product improvements.

And you are part of the JAMF family. They take care of you. Whether it’s new product manuals showing up without us needing to ask for them, or the dinner party at Macworld, (which I missed this year due to a personal schedule conflict, and boy was I bummed) JAMF treats its customers very well.

We have a level of control and asset tracking on the Macs that we have never had before. I honestly believe the success of our Casper rollout has directly lead to more Macs being bought on campus this year. The ease and speed that a campus tech has to deploy a new Mac lab, even one with a custom XP lab image built in VMware Fusion, means that a lot of the PC labs with a few Macs in them are turning into all Mac labs with VMs running for dual-purpose use. Always good for the MacSys group when our number increase.

Hope this helped,

Snook

I’ve been a Jamf customer since 2007, and the sentiment in the referral email I shared 11 years ago still rings true. Jamf has grown immensely in size since that little party in San Francisco, but the core of what Jamf is remains to this day. It’s about the people. I can still email Ben when I have a sales question, or Shawn when I have a question about our cloud hosting. I talk to Jeni about customer advocacy, and I talk to our enterprise tech, Zach, all the time about product improvements and troubleshooting questions. I meet with Dean at every JNUC, and I’ve seen him take the time to talk with customers. It’s still the Jamf family, and I’m happy to be a part of it.

Kevin Snook is a systems program specialist at Appalachian University.