The Home Depot’s Mac users had to reach the mainframe through a Windows app in Citrix. WND Terminal gave them a native Mac connection and removed the servers and Citrix licences that existed just to run the emulator.
Before and after
| Before | After WND Terminal | |
|---|---|---|
| How Mac users reached the mainframe | Citrix-published Windows emulator | Native Mac app (Apple Silicon and Intel) |
| Login to first mainframe screen | About 90 seconds (Citrix sign-in, app launch, connect) | About 5 seconds |
| "Citrix froze / session dropped" tickets | About 640 a month | Fewer than 40 a month |
| PF keys on a Mac keyboard | Hold Fn, hope Citrix passes it through | Work as expected; keyboard maps for anything custom |
| Copy and paste between the mainframe and Mac apps | Unreliable through Citrix | Native, including copy-as-table into Excel and Numbers |
| Emulator license per seat | $240, up 12% in the last renewal | $72 |
| Citrix capacity for the emulator | 38 servers plus Citrix licensing for 2,800 users | None |
Mac users depended on a Windows app in Citrix.
Merchants and planners at The Home Depot make decisions on the mainframe all day: item setups, price changes, purchase orders, inventory positions across thousands of stores. Many of them work on MacBooks. The emulator didn't have a Mac version, so IT published the Windows emulator through Citrix.
"It worked the way Citrix always works, which is mostly," Whitaker says. "Until the morning it didn't, and 400 merchants couldn't open a purchase order."
The people using it every day paid for it in small cuts. Sessions dropped when a laptop went to sleep, losing whatever was on the screen. Function keys depended on whether Citrix passed the Fn key through that day. Copy and paste between the mainframe and a Mac spreadsheet worked sometimes. Every reconnect meant another sign-in.
"I'd be halfway through setting up 200 SKUs and the Citrix window would just go gray," Pierce says. "You learn to save your work by writing it on a sticky note, which is insane in 2026."
IT carried the infrastructure cost: 38 Citrix servers sized for peak merchandising season, plus Citrix licensing for every Mac user, all to run one terminal emulator. On top of that, the legacy vendor raised its per-seat price 12% at the last renewal, without ever releasing a Mac version.
"We asked them about a native Mac client four renewals in a row," Whitaker says. "The answer was always 'it's on the roadmap.' The price increases were never on a roadmap. They just showed up."
Why WND Terminal
WND Terminal is a native app for both Mac and Windows, one universal app for Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. It isn't a Windows program in a wrapper or a browser tab. For The Home Depot, that meant:
- No Citrix in the path. The Mac app connects straight to the mainframe, encrypted, using the same connections IT sets for Windows.
- Managed like any other Mac app. IT deploys it through Jamf and sets connections, backup hosts and security options with a standard Mac configuration profile, the same settings Windows gets through Group Policy.
- A keyboard that makes sense on a Mac. PF1–PF24, PA keys, Clear and Reset all map to a Mac keyboard out of the box, and app shortcuts use ⌘. Keyboard maps imported from the old emulator carried over, so Windows users kept their exact keys too.
- Feels like a Mac app. It has tabs, side-by-side sessions, a command palette, and dark mode that follows macOS. Key names on the screen, like
F3=Exit, can be clicked.
"The first time I opened it, I didn't believe it was the mainframe," Pierce says. "It opened in a couple of seconds. My keys worked. I closed the lid, opened it, and it had reconnected by itself. I actually laughed."
The rollout
The Home Depot moved its Mac users first, since they had the most to gain. IT built a Jamf policy and configuration profile in a day, ran a two-week pilot with 150 merchants, and moved the rest of the 2,800 Mac users over three weeks. The Windows population followed through Intune over nine weeks, importing existing profiles and keyboard maps along the way.
The Citrix delivery group for the emulator stayed up for one month as a fallback. Fewer than a dozen people used it, and then it was turned off.
The results
The emulator is off Citrix. All 38 Citrix servers that hosted the emulator were retired, along with Citrix licensing for 2,800 users. IT puts the combined infrastructure and licensing savings at about $610,000 a year.
Emulator licensing at under a third of the price. At $72 a seat against a $240 renewal quote, licensing for 9,500 seats fell from about $2.28M to about $684,000 a year. Including Citrix, total cost to deliver the mainframe to these teams fell from about $2.89M to $684,000, or 76%.
About 94% fewer Citrix tickets. Tickets about frozen or dropped emulator sessions fell from about 640 a month to under 40, and most of those remaining are about other Citrix apps.
Merchants get time back every day. Going from 90 seconds to 5 to reach the mainframe, several times a day, plus automatic reconnects instead of gray Citrix windows, gives each merchant an estimated 15 to 20 minutes a day.
"People who need a Mac love it. That's the whole story," Whitaker says. "I've never had a business team send IT a thank-you note for an infrastructure change. I got eleven."
What's next
The Home Depot is rolling out WND Terminal's copy-as-table feature to its pricing team, which builds weekly reports from mainframe lists. It's also evaluating Explain for its distribution center support desk.
