Our company was recently acquired by another organization, and both companies currently use Apple Business Manager for device management. Apple Support told us that devices cannot be cleanly transferred between the two Business Manager tenants and would instead need to be deregistered and manually enrolled in the acquiring company's tenant. With employees and equipment spread across Canada and the United States, that would be a major administrative effort. Are there supported alternatives or practical approaches other organizations have used during an acquisition?
3 Answers
Another practical approach is to maintain both tenants during the transition. Stop adding devices to the old environment, purchase and enroll all replacements through the new one, and let the existing fleet phase out naturally. This avoids a large-scale deregistration and re-enrollment project.
You generally don’t need to move every device from the old Apple Business Manager tenant. Keep the original tenant active, stop assigning new purchases to it, and create or configure the acquiring company’s MDM server there. Then migrate the devices to the new MDM environment using the available MDM migration process. The old tenant can remain until its final devices are retired.
That was our experience too. The difficult part was moving devices to a different MDM product, so we tested every enrollment script carefully before doing the wider rollout.
Some organizations choose to replace the existing equipment instead of attempting a tenant migration. In one multinational acquisition, users received new devices enrolled in the acquiring company’s environment, while they were allowed to keep their old hardware. It made the transition simpler, although the cost and refresh schedule have to make sense.
That’s a helpful option I hadn’t considered. Repointing devices to the new MDM while letting the old tenant age out sounds much more manageable than manually transferring everything.