Macs in the enterprise: How d'you like them Apples

By Computerworld Canada Staff, Computerworld
May 02, 2008 07:30 PM ET

. What's this?

Slowly but surely, Apple is creeping into the enterprise. There's may be some italics on that 'slowly,' due to administrator reluctance and Microsoft's near-monopoly, but plenty of IT professionals are getting their first taste of Apple, including the new business-based features in Leopard, improved admin ability, and a hankering for one of those MacBook Airs (well, maybe).

Just the facts, ma'am

Corporate interest in Macs is up dramatically among IT executives, driven by changes in what the Mac has to offer, by Apple's success in the consumer market and its other niches, and by corporate trends where, thanks to virtualization and a migration to Web-based applications, Windows' grip on the desktop may be starting to loosen just a bit.

"I'm getting more and more questions about bringing Macs into the enterprise and what it would take," says Tim Bajarin, president of strategic consulting firm Creative Strategies Inc. in Campbell, Calif.

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Charles Smulders, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., says he too has experienced a substantial increase in Mac inquiries from corporate customers.

The surge of interest in the Mac is a direct result of two developments from 2006: first, the evolution of more Windows-friendly, Intel X86-based Macs, and second, the introduction of Boot Camp, which allows a full Windows environment and its complement of applications to run natively in a separate hard drive partition on any Mac.

Boot Camp, in particular, garnered a lot of attention out the gate. According to Apple, 1.5 million copies of the beta version of Boot Camp were downloaded before the program's release as part of the Leopard version of OS X. The full integration of Boot Camp into Leopard has spurred some IT managers to actively review the potential of OS X as an alternative for general business computing.

While most of the Santa Monica-based IT consultancy 318's clients that use Macs extensively are in the video, sound and advertising realm, director of technology Charles Edge says he is seeing more nontraditional customers willing to make a move. "We have two energy companies and a fountain design company that switched [from Windows] to Macs last year," he says. None of those, however, were large companies, meaning those with more than 500 employees.

No love from daddy

There's just one problem. "Apple will tell you that they are focused on [the commercial business market], but at the end of the day, it's not a big priority for them," says David Daoud, an analyst at IDC.

An Apple spokesperson said the company does support corporate customers but declined to elaborate on Apple's enterprise strategy.

That ambivalence is a concern for IT managers like Dale Frantz, CIO at Auto Warehousing Co. (AWC) in Tacoma, Wash., which last year began a corporate-wide project to migrate to Macs across 23 locations. "The biggest weakness at this point I'd say is the lack of a cohesive enterprise strategy on the part of Apple," he says.

Outside of a few large media and advertising firms, corporations are simply not one of Apple's core markets. "There is no pretense on their part that the next mountain they have to conquer is the enterprise," says Bajarin.