Director of information technology for Tropitone Furniture in Irvine, Calif.

The MacBook Pro has become the primary laptop for our entire IT department, as well as for all design and marketing functions. We run both the Mac OS X and Windows XP, which runs under Parallels on the Macs. This has been a big success for us, so much so that we have added a dual quad-core Mac Pro Tower to replace two Windows PCs to the IT department and are in the process of moving our entire enterprise backup function to a new Apple Xserve RAID combination with an Exabyte tape library running Bakbone Software's Netvault.

This combination was selected due to the success we have had with all of our Mac products to date, and the volume, speed and capacity projected by Apple. Apple as a vendor has been very flexible in working with us to evaluate this server package. To date, I am very impressed with the ease of setup and configuration of the Xserve and hope to be as impressed by the backup functions as well, but won't know until later this month.

My company has been a combination Windows and Linux environment for the last six years. We run Windows XP Pro for desktops and laptops, Windows 2000 and 2003 Servers and several Linux distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Servers and SUSE Open Enterprise Server. Beginning last fall, we began adding MacBook Pro laptops running the Intel Core 2 Duo processors to various departments to replace existing laptops, which were due to be upgraded.

This has been a very successful transition for us to make the move to the Mac thus far. From an IT perspective, I can say that the move to Mac has been met with both acceptance and satisfaction. I always viewed the Mac as for the creative designer types, photographers and artists. I had no idea it could work so well as an IT management tool.

Based on the experience we have had, and from input I have received from other IT professionals, I think IT departments need to open up their thinking on Apple as a true enterprise alternative at all levels. Apple is making gains in the enterprise and with the onerous costs and complexities Microsoft has created for all enterprises, more companies could stand a real alternative for their enterprise operations.