Can Apple Penetrate the Corporation?

coondoggie sends us a NetworkWorld story on the prospects for Apple gaining market share in the corporation. A number of factors are helping to catch the eye of those responsible for upgrading desktops and servers, the article claims: "Apple's shift to the Intel architecture; the inclusion of infrastructure and interoperability hooks, such as directory services, in the Mac OS X Server; dual-boot capabilities; clustering and storage technology; third-party virtualization software; and comparison shopping, which is being fostered by migration costs and hardware overhauls associated with Microsoft's Vista." On this last point, one network admin is quoted: "The changes in Vista are significant enough that we think we can absorb the change going to Macs just as easily as going to Vista."

why not?

[User 956 (568564)]

Can Apple Penetrate the Corporation?

Why not? They're already penetrating consumers.

Re:why not?

[jellomizer (103300)]

Purposely missing the joke. The is a solid reason for Corporations not to use Macs. Sure right now they are the Hot Platform and arguably just as good if not better then most other Computer Platform of the same market, and the prices a competitive (Yes they are, I don't want to hear about some el-cheap-o Dell PC that just match one or 2 specs, If you match them up pound for pound spec for spec the prices are very close). But the issue is the same issue of why Microsoft got dominance early on. It is the fact that Apple primarily run OS X and OS X only runs on Apple. So in 2, 5, 10, 20 years when Apple Quality begins to drop and stink like it did in the early-mid 90's companies software are stuck with Apple. At least with Microsoft Windows if what ever PC brand they are using begins to loose it competitive edge they can switch quite easily. Just think about IBM when they sold their PC Unit to Lenovo. A lot of companies (especially government) when it came to upgrade their PC they just went with Dell, HP or whatever without much hassle, with little Major Software redesigns or intensive training classes. Now they may go with Macs but they will just put Windows only on them and not take advantage of Mac OS, which would be pointless because you have better selection with other PC distributers. Linux is getting better but still there is little effort in making a good Desktop Linux and the fact that MS Office has a huge dominance. For your own Personal PC go with a Mac it is great even if you use it for work. But for a wide scale company layout going with Apple would only be a short term gain with a huge long term risk.

Re:Are you sure?

[xploraiswakco (703340)]

Fire this guy, before he talks to your boss. Jesus! I love Macs - but don't think for a minute that you can use them with smartcards and automatically deployed certificate infrastructures, or any form of distributed policy management, etc. Where is the corporate distribution of packaged software?

You might want to do your homework first... smartcards systems can be used on OS X, and "certificate infrastructures" Directory Services handles "distributed policy management", Apple Remote Desktop, ssh, NetBoot, can all be used with distribution of packaged software, what you have to remember is, some software doesn't like being distributed that way on Windows or Mac OS X (Adobe software is a good example of that).

What?

[Colin Smith (2679)]

Yeah. The entire enterprise application base from Win32 to POSIX/Cocoa.

You don't need the entire application base of Win32, only the applications that you need. If the apps required for his company are available on OSX then, well, what's the problem.

Where is the corporate distribution of packaged software?

It's Unix, this's been trivial for decades. The hard part is the politics.

See, in the real world there's no such thing as perfect, it literally can't exist. There is only ever good enough and no two people stand at exactly the same point on the good enough continuum.

If you want badly managed client end-points, go ahead.

snort... Sorry, but Windows is the epitome... the very apotheosis of badly managed end points, even with all the bells and whistles of AD and SMS it's still ridiculously painful.

 

Re:What?

[arivanov (12034)]

Ahem.

As a matter of fact there are fewer and fewer client side apps in an average corporation. Most IT departments do not have the competence and resources to support internal development. I no longer even get pissed off when I hear an IT boss wannabie speaking the "We are not software developers" mantra. In fact in many places, not using software "as shipped and specified by the vendor" has become a firing offence.

Most internal applications have long moved to various forms of portals/intranet servers which makes the end-client platform considerably less relevant. In fact moving from IE6 to IE7 and further to vista access controls have caused (and will cause) the same level of pain as moving to a different OS + browser.

As far as corporate readiness goes, Apple has everything it needs from a technological viewpoint to be ready. However, it is not currently showing the will and desire to go after that market. It does not have a corporation oriented sales channel. It does not have corporation oriented support channel either. Its entire model is geared towards end-users (alone or within an educational establishment).

Actually the situation is not entirely dissimilar from the early PC days.

In those days enterprises where terminal shops with terminals connected to a mainframe or minivax or a unix system. Few places were running Unix using early vintage X terminals. The PC went for the small business and personal market first and from there it displaces the terminals in the larger businesses.

Nowdays the situation is about the same. Microsoft has been paying too much attention to large business customers and ignoring the place it started - SMBs, small ISVs and personal use. At the same time most internal company applications are now server based and very few things run on the clients. This is roughly the position of mainframes of old and we very well know how they have been displaced by a product which was initially adopted by SMBs and for personal use.

So, Apple if they want to, can try to repeat the Microsoft of early days. Currently, they are not showing that they are willing to do so.

Re:Are you sure?

[molarmass192 (608071)]

Ok ... first of all ... most enterprise applications are web based, have been for a while now, as for the rest, you're misinformed ...

Office ... available for Mac.
Smart Cards ... work as of Tiger
Certificates ... see Certificate Assistant added in Tiger

Distributed policy management ... it's UNIX underneath ... see NIS

Corporate distribution of packaged software ... see Software Update Server

Granted, most of this is newish since it was only added in 10.4 (04/2005) but it's all there.

Re:You should keep looking...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Again, the cost is more for a card system, than a whole identity and policy management infrastructure on AD.

OTOH, the identity and policy management infrastructure on OS X comes gratis with the server OS. And the remote management and package distribution system costs a grand total of $500 for unlimited users. In my office the database needed to back the Windows remote/package management system cost more thatn 20 times that. There are no CALs for any services. I think this impact most corporate users a lot more than the cost of smartcard system.

I'd like to see

[mgabrys_sf (951552)]

Some concrete numbers on admin costs between the two platforms. Whatever reasons you proscribe to the whole Windows vs Macs vs every electronic plague on the planet, I suspect there's some serious cost-benefits to making the switch at the corporate level.

If nothing else I'd love to see a larger market-share for Apple just to cut down on the number of spam-generating zombies out there.

Re:I'd like to see

[jcr (53032)]

They don't allow for corporate volume discounts

Yes they do. Ask any Apple sales rep about it.

-jcr

If you're going to get like that...

[Rix (54095)]

In Soviet Russia, BSD confirms it: Netcraft is dying.

Re:I'd like to see

[llf4nlp (665478)]

The problem with Apple is that they do not consider the corporation to be a target audience. They don't allow for corporate volume discounts (that alone is a massive deal breaker, making them substantially more expensive than anything else); and they don't provide customer service packages that mid-to-large corporations expect.

This is not accruate. I am an Apple Authorized Business Agent, and Apple Enterprise sales group absolutely can and does offer corporate dicounts. Check your facts. Call Apple, ask for entrprise sales, and talk turkey. Evidently, you'll be surprised.

Re:Indeed

[fyngyrz (762201)]

It seems to me that if the IT department (Ok, the undergrad who has to act like an IT department) is leaving IE as the default browser on those machines, you're getting pretty much what you deserve. Get them to put Firefox on there and the general level of noise and hijacking will settle down quite a bit.

Or you can go Mac and it'll settle down to zero and stay there. :)

Re:I'd like to see

[Bastian (66383)]

"Can Apple subvert IT departments' love of Microsoft and IBM?"

I'm not sure it's even a love of Microsoft and IBM so much as a love of control and hostility to change, especially change not implemented by them.

I've seen a government office's IT department refuse to send a standard USB mouse to a team that needed one for a Mac they had purchased because "we don't know how to support a Mac." Even after the head of the team had calmly explained to them that all they need to know in this particular case is how to tell a USB connector from a PS/2 connector. I don't see anything there but the IT department trying to play power games - something that I see hints of every single time I go out to visit a client site.

Yes and Maybe No

[otacon (445694)]

Yes I can see how switching to a Mac could absord the cost of Vista and it's hardware requirments but what about the cost of training a whole enterprise of users on MacOSX.

Re:Yes and Maybe No

[JimDaGeek (983925)]

The cost of training is crap. Stick any user on a Mac or Linux desktop that is setup well and there won't be much need for training.

The big cost is all the custom software that was written with an MS-Only IDE, to MS-Only API's and specs. That is the real killer.

I am a senior programmer with more than a decade of experience. During that time about 90% of my work has been MS-only stuff.

I have written C code for Win32
I have written C code for Solaris
I have written C code for Linux
I have written C++ code for Win32
I have written C++ code for Solaris
I have written C++ code for Linux
I have written Java code for Win32/Solaris/Linux
I have written VB code for Win32
I have written C# code for Win32


The funny thing, all the code I have written for non-MS OS'es has been pretty portable. The MS software, well, that has been MS-Only. MS designed their whole software "ecosystem" to lock you in.

So the real cost of switching from MS is not in training, but in re-writing custom apps. Notice I didn't say _porting_. Most MS-Only apps don't port very well. MS made it this way for a reason, to lock-in customers. The more MS software your company uses, the more locked-in you are.

Our Business

[geekmansworld (950281)]

While our workstations are still Windows only, I've managed to make to make our office's server environment 100% OS X Server. Ironically, our MS Access database application is now served by a mySQL backend on an XServe.

However, corporations and businesses in general are prone to using a lot of custom-designed software built by Windows-only outfits. Until that changes, Apple will have a hard time penetrating the corporation.

Nope - Companies/Groups Have Innate Cultures

[by Anonymous Coward]

For Microsoft it is an inability to grasp and implement computer security concepts.

For Open Source it is an inability to make hard and reasonable choice in UI design.

For Apple, it is a complete lack of understanding of the corporate computing mindset. Also game development, but that's a whole other subject.

It's already happening

[That's Unpossible! (722232)]

But not the way you'd expect, top down from the IT department. Nope, it's happening from the ground up, as people start buying Macs on their own, bringing them into work (or working from home), and the IT guys are scrambling to integrate them. Then the IT guys start to like the hardware, they buy it for home use, they push it for work use. It creeps in. I've seen this happen at my own employer, as well as with some of my friends' employers.

Especially at small companies. The company I work at was 100% Windows just 2 years ago. Now we are 90% Mac (only holdouts being our servers, and the dev machines that work on the servers). The impetus was security -- get everyone using Macs since they're safer for browsing/email -- but in the end, people just liked them better, and they require less maintenance. I know, because I'm the guy maintaining them.

A friend today (new Mac convert) was groaning about getting help from his office IT guy for his MacBook, on a printing issue, because that IT worker was openly hostile to Macs. Only months ago, that IT worker was laughing when he heard my friend was considering a Mac, don't get it, it's not compatible with our stuff, you won't be able to do what you need to on there, etc. I just received an email, literally 10 minutes ago -- this same IT guy heard about his printing issue today and WANTS to help. Why? Because more of his other customers are moving to Macs, and now that he's had to use them, he actually PREFERS THEM! He's thinking about getting one for himself!

The vista people are looking at is increasingly filled with Macs... the Wow starts now for sure, but perhaps it wasn't what Microsoft was expecting... as in Wow, there are a lot of Macs in this office.

Most corporate users don't need a whole computer

[Logic Bomb (122875)]

I'm a former Apple employee, my current job is primarily about supporting Macs, and I do independent Mac-related consulting on the side. And even I think most of the time, for most employees, it's dumb for large companies to shell out $$$ for individual computers. Remote terminals based on something like a Citrix server are so completely the way to go. The vast majority of corporate users do email, web, spreadsheets, and text documents. Most organizations already give users a network home for their documents rather than running backup software on every single desktop computer. It makes no sense to go through the headaches of software management, hardware maintenance, etc on hundreds/thousands of computers when you can do it all with a few servers.

I love it when Apple moves into a new space. But until you can do something like a Citrix session to a Mac OS server, I don't think their stuff has any role as a standard workstation in large businesses.

They need to break into some new markets ...

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

By way of example, I understand that the Vatican is evaluating the X-Serve group's latest content filtering product, the X-Communicator, as well as the ODBC (Open Deity-Base Converter) standard, used in a supernaturally-high-availability cloistering add-on. Also, to help fulfill the proselytizing requirements of most modern organized religions, a new bulk-email package code-named "Ad-Minister" is currently under development.

Sure! I'm game.

[peacefinder (469349)]

Absolutely yes. I'd buy Apple desktops - and cheerfully pay the premium to run Parallels/XP on some of 'em - if Apple made the right hardware product. I would buy seven next week. But right now, they don't make what I need.

The Mac Pro is grossly overpowered for what we need, which makes it much too expensive for us to consider. The Mac Mini's laptop-class hard drive is probably too unreliable (and not user-serviceable enough) for our 5-year desktop replacement cycle. And while the iMac is about right in many ways, I already have LCDs throughout so buying an all-in-one makes no sense for us.

What I'd need to buy Macs for the office is a headless machine that delivers a single Core 2 Duo, a gig of RAM, integrated graphics, and a basic desktop-class SATA drive in a user-serviceable chassis for around $1100.

But Apple does not seem to be interested in the low-end desktop market, so it's back to Dell for me.

Biggest Challenge for Apple in Corporate Market Is

[Glasswire (302197)]

...that corporate world is not going to wait every year until MacWorld to find out what the product roadmap is.
Apple will have to ditch the culture of secrecy (they can keep it for the consumer stuff) over their roadmaps. Corporate buyers need long lead times and intro and dicontinuance notices. And corporate IT wants plenty of notice on technology directions from all their key vendors (partially so they can warn off the ones that are about to make a mistake) so Apple's attitude about this would HAVE to change.

Re:Ew.

[jcr (53032)]

Well, yes and no.

Steve Jobs spent a lot of time and money trying to get the fortune 500 to use NeXT computers, and I think he just doesn't care much about that market anymore. The Xserve and Xserve RAID are fine machines, and far less work to set up and operate than any other system I can name, but Apple's just not staffed to offer the kind of enterprise-level support that HP, and Sun are. I plan to use a lot of Xserves in my current venture, but I do so knowing that I'm going to have to provide the on-site rapid response service to our customers myself.

-jcr

Re:Ew.

[Vancorps (746090)]

You have some points but Xserves still aren't as capable as modern solutions from Sun, HP, and hell, even Dell. Think SAN management, it's not impossible but its quite a bit more difficult on the Mac side of the fence. Maybe in a few more years they'll gear it up but monitoring and management have always been the weak side for Apple as they generally prefer to give the power to the user. This is great for home users but very bad for corporate users.

The support you mention is probably the biggest stumbling block for Apple at the current time however.

Re:This topic perenially arises

[sakusha (441986)]

You're missing some basic information here.
Apple does have an Enterprise sales division and they are quite different from the consumer division, you get dedicated Apple representatives for your account. Onsite service contracts are available for server systems. Apple has always had self-servicing programs for enterprises, although the investment in spares can be a bit high.

Another factor is your allegations that uncertainty over future products hampers enterprise planning. The switch to Intel changed this picture considerably. Apple's future products track rather closely to Intel's.