Ogilvy & Mather

Going gray

With 497 offices worldwide, Ogilvy and Mather builds brands for clients on a global and local scale. Navigating such an enormous market requires flexibility. Providing that flexibility for the last eight years is Jeffrey Bonacci, Senior Creative Systems Engineer and Applications Specialist of North American IT.

To describe his role, Jeffrey serves as the “creative liaison to IT.” To describe his work, he says, “I develop ideas on how to implement the technology that will move our business forward.”

But that work, according to Jeffrey, has brought gray hairs, which creep up his sideburns.

“The creative professionals have living, breathing workstations, utilizing many emerging technologies that sometimes my team isn’t familiar with,” said Jeffrey. “I need to maintain inventory, compliance, and enterprise level security and at the same time don’t want to dictate how they work on their machines.”

Providing his professionals with desktop flexibility generates more gray hair because he has to dedicate more time to inventory tracking and compliance.

Discovering the fountain of youth

With Jamf Pro, Jeffrey was promised a way to turn three weeks of work into a day or even milliseconds. But Jeffrey is not an easy sell.

“I’m not going to deploy a solution if it is not going to work,” he said. “I don’t have time to coddle. Advertising is a volatile business: We need work done quickly and precisely.”

Jeffrey was familiar with Jamf Pro, and he was eager to learn about how it could serve the business. So Jeffrey and the Jamf professionals devised a simple test as part of deployment.

“This test was the deciding factor as to whether we would make the investment,” he said.

The business needed to replace a bundled application on 750 Macs. In the past, such a deployment would require Jeffrey to hire 10-15 people to visit every workstation over two days. With Jamf Pro, he created a package in 25 minutes and sent it to a dozen machines in 20 minutes.

“It worked phenomenally,” he said. “Of the 750 Macs, I only had four machines that needed additional support.”

The triumph of a conquistador

Like an elixir, Jamf Pro has transformed Jeffrey’s work day.

“Jamf Pro obliterated the need to do a physical inventory,” he said. In seconds, Jeffrey can capture granular detail on all data from the entire network.

“I can drill down into specific operating systems, RAM, drives, peripherals... everything.” Jeffrey said. “I also know a machine’s entire history—purchase date, serial number, users, and ailments.”

Knowing this history and inventory, Jeffrey has been able to maintain compliance and standardize desktops. Jamf Pro handles compliance logistics, so Jeffrey meets SOX requirements, and he didn’t sacrifice flexibility for standardization.

“With Jamf Pro, I can get everyone in the same place with the same image without feeling intrusive,” said Jeffrey. Most important is remote deployment. “Image creation is so much easier and more efficient. What took days, is now done overnight. I can deploy packages with a click.”

Like a conquistador, Jeffrey now commands and explores. He will always have to monitor the network, but now he can design as well.

“I get to decide on how to do my work and then let Jamf Pro execute those decisions,” Jeffrey said. “It frees up my time and makes my job less stressful.”

He uses that time to facilitate more collaboration and focus on continuing to move the business forward both nationally and internationally. Despite those local and global goals, the stress reduction has kept his gray hair from spreading.

I get to decide on how to do my work and then let Jamf Pro execute those decisions. It frees up my time and makes my job less stressful.

— Jeffrey Bonacci