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One of the major shifts we’ve witnessed in recent years is the move from holding major OS releases internally as long as possible to celebrating the rapid adoption. SAP recently announced they had achieved an 83% adoption rate for Apple’s new version of macOS within an outstanding 25 days.
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Last year, the team at SAP had an extremely rapid rollout for macOS Ventura. SAP’s Harald Monihart had this to say about the team’s goals for macOS Sonoma:
We wanted to measure our success this year by increasing the adoption rate by 11%. That would have meant that in the first 30 days of its release, we needed to accomplish an astonishing 75% of our fleet are on the new major operating system.
The team set the OKR at 75%, and they blew through it at 83%. Harald notes that daily standup sync meetings were a big driver in the success as the team worked through bottlenecks and roadblocks together.
Harald also credits legendary macOS admin and author Rich Trouton for his work on SAP’s macOS Sonoma backlog and ensuring SAP’s day-zero readiness and also some great enhancements for employees, including the use of SSO extensions.
There a three reasons why day-zero is crucial to us at SAP. First, it is the easiest way for us and our employees to help SAP stay secure as Apple fixes all known vulnerabilities with its latest updates. Second, it allows us to ensure we can offer Apple’s latest hardware. For example with today’s Apple event. We know we can support new Macs as our internal processes are setup to continuously work on macOS readiness. Third, it provides our employees with the latest productivity features like bringing all the widgets from our internal native iOS apps to the Desktop of macOS Sonoma.
Harald Monihart, SAP
Why are companies prioritizing OS upgrades?
Apple has really encouraged fast and rapid upgrades of macOS and iOS in recent years. It’s not just about unlocking new features, but it’s for proactive security measures. When released, these upgrades become the most secure version of Apple’s OS’. While Apple does continue to maintain the previous versions for security upgrades, the latest versions become the ones Apple recommends. Apple only allows IT teams to block major upgrades for 90 days from releases to allow teams to do their final testing, so the expectation is that after 30 months, employees will have the option to stay current.
We’ve come a long way from when companies would keep employees on existing OS (Apple and Windows) for compatibility reasons. Today, security concerns mean that everyone has to get compatible with new versions – and do it quickly.
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