Cisco on Tuesday is expected to give a big wet enterprise kiss to Apple by unwrapping a version of its Unified Personal Communicator for the Apple Mac and Leopard as well as Microsoft Windows.
According to a blog post by M. Michael Acosta, manager of Cisco engineering, Cisco’s unified communications client was developed in parallel on both Mac and Windows and is a fully native Mac application with a user-interface developed specifically for the platform.
The desktop application supports voice, video, instant messaging, Web conferencing, voice mail, and presence information from a single, multimedia interface. Cisco already offers SSL and IPSec VPN clients for the Mac OS, as well as MeetingPlace and WebEx web conferencing packages.
Apple has also made support for EAP-FAST a native part of OS X, Acosta said.Cisco’s announcement can only help the corporate stature of the Mac.
There have been a number of other changes that are helping Apple move on corporate America: Apple’s shift to the Intel architecture; the inclusion of as directory services in the Mac OS X Server; clustering and storage technology; third-party virtualization software; and certainly the migration costs and hardware overhauls associated with Microsoft’s Vista.
Granted Mac’s share of the desktop market has been hovering around 4% since 2000 and isn’t expected to change through 2010, IDC says. IDC’s numbers for Mac are worse in the server market, where the Mac OS X Server’s share still sits around 1% vs. other options.
No one said it would be easy.
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