These Macs mean business

Apple’s products my have a shot at enterprise adoption after all, according to the Enterprise Desktop Alliance. IDC says more companies are building applications for the Macintosh platform
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And the release of the Vista operating system that Londini described as "not stunningly, startlingly better" than its predecessor is yet another driver. He doesn't think Vista is necessarily bad but at the end of the day, users question whether the upgrade was worth the time and money.

And, while interoperability of the Mac platform used to be a thorn in the side of many an IT manager who would merely tolerate Macs for the creative types, Londini said that's now different since Apple moved from the Motorola chipset to the Intel platform. "They really narrowed the gap. They can ride on some of the success that the Linux and open source world has been having in the server room because Mac OS X is largely a BSD variant which is from the Linux family," he said. However Microsoft, he added, is also making strides towards better interoperability.

The falling price of the Mac, too, has served to push enterprise adoption as Intel chipsets now allow for commodities of scale. However, Londini cautioned that price and quality can be subjective. The relatively higher acquisition cost of Mac hardware could be justified because, he said, Apple doesn't offer a "B grade product; you couldn't just go out and buy the $200 piece of crud version of hardware and watch your operating system just slog along on it."

Phil Smith, commercial desktop product manager with Hewlett-Packard, said that while there are "small gains" by Apple in smaller businesses, he hasn't observed the same for the medium and enterprise level.

Macs work well for small businesses because of their tendency to act more like a consumer, said Smith, and "get tied up in the flashiness and excitement of consumer-type applications that might come with the [machine]. And Apple has a lot of that more personal entertainment-type of an interface." Enterprises, on the other hand, he said, have no need for consumer-based applications or designs "so there is much less of an interest there."

Besides, Smith thinks Mac and Windows have their respective niches among users. "A Mac product is wonderful in many ways when you're using it in a consumer environment because that is what it's really been designed for. And the same can be said for Windows PCs. It is wonderful in many ways in the business environment because that is what it's been designed to do."

And he noted that the Vista operating system is designed to meet the security requirements of an enterprise environment.

There's a low risk of the Mac's enterprise presence growing enough to warrant concern for vendors of Windows-based machines, Smith insisted. "Certainly Hewlett-Packard doesn't see it as a big threat right now in the enterprise corporate space." Instead, the competition will primarily focus on the small business sector, where Smith said Hewlett-Packard has offerings "to counter that balance."

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