* Management in a multiplatform environment
The latest round of Mac advertisements tickles me. Despite not having used an Apple since my dearly departed and much beloved IIe, I must confess I laughed as the company’s “Hi, I’m a Mac” character poked fun at Windows by comparing the Mac’s device compatibility and “straight-out-of-the-box” functions to Windows’ cumbersome driver and update requirements. I was amused not least because, while compatibility is a big part of Mac’s consumer success, it has never been a strong suit for Apple in the enterprise management arena.
We have all been there – running a Windows network with Active Directory and SMS, but the marketing team uses Mac, and the developers run Linux; or the standard e-mail client is Outlook, but the boss demands Lotus. Moreover, as I noted in my last newsletter, new mobile devices running Windows Mobile, Palm OS, BlackBerry, or Symbian OS are penetrating the network as well. Add to this the multiple applications and operating system versions (are you ready for Vista migration yet? Or maybe looking at SuSE Linux Desktop?), as an administrator, you are really in a bind. Business users need flexibility but administrators need standards.
As EMA’s upcoming research report on virtualization shows, this can create more problems. As an enterprise IT administrator, you use Norton Ghost to create a standard desktop with Windows and a standard set of firewall, virus scanner, configuration agent, and desktop software. Patches come along, and you dutifully push them out through your desktop management software. In the meantime, however, an end user (or maybe a departmental administrator) has installed a system-level virtualization utility, and is running Linux or even Unix with non-standard software and no configuration agent. Or maybe your standard install is Mac, and a user has decided to run Apple Boot Camp and Windows instead.
The reality is, and will continue to be, one of technological diversity. Complete compatibility is a dream, and complete incompatibility is a nightmare, but most enterprise administrators need to live somewhere in between. And they need their management tools to do the same. As Boot Camp and virtualization technologies like Parallels come into play in the enterprise, Macs will become more attractive tools to satisfy specific business-use cases. Similarly, the impending Vista rollout will push many enterprises at least to dip their toes in the Mac or Linux waters. Some may dive in headfirst, but diversity will continue to be the rule.
The solution is not easy – either juggle multiple tools for specific operating systems, or find a desktop management solution that manages it all.
Unfortunately, managing multiple tools increases costs and causes process breakdowns, and most enterprise management vendors either focus on a limited number of systems, or at best have specific gaps around either Mac or some mobile operating systems. Open standards like DMTF will help, but until more management vendors support greater diversity, this will cause problems for enterprise administrators, and ultimately will slow both adoption and cost-effectiveness of niche operating systems from vendors like Novell, Symbian, PalmSource, Red Hat and Apple.
