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."

I'd like to see

[mgabrys_sf]

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.

Yes and Maybe No

[otacon]

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.

This topic perenially arises

[ThousandStars]

And people perenially point out the problems:

You can't get enterprise level support. I.e. next day overnight shipping for parts, 24-hour tech high-level support, etc. Getting a damn power supply should be easily done online a la the stuff Dell and HP offer. Speaking of that, it's also damn near impossible to get an online system apart from the basic Apple store.

No xMac. [arstechnica.com] The Mini helps in this regard, but Apple still doesn't offer a basic tower.

Exchange client/server. It's not good enough until it's perfect.

Uncertainty regarding OS X and hardware. The enterprise doesn't like not knowing what Steve Jobs is going to pull out of his hat in six weeks when you need new hardware today.

The first point is probably the most important, and the article doesn't really address how things have changed. Ever since 10.1 people have speculated Apple is finally pushing into the enterprise... maybe this time it will be. I'm skeptical given Apple's past intransigence. And I'm posting from a PowerBook.

Our Business

[geekmansworld]

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

[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.

Admins maybe, large enterprise I am not so sure

[ernest.cunningham]

As a developer and inhouse tech I use my MacBook Pro as my dailey machine, as I can run Mac OS X (Native OS), Windows XP, Vista etc, in virtualised environments where I can test each environment before deploying anything. So for the techs the new MacBook Pro laptops are especially in range for migrating to. However, the major hurdle I see in enterprise adopting Mac OS as their main OS and replacing workplace pc's with Macs is that there is no current Mac OS "Terminal Services" style server implementation. So no thin clients, no centralised licensing control etc. I will be the first to admit (as a huge Mac fan) that windows terminal services in enterprise where most users use solely MS Office, and the likes of FileMaker or Oricle etc works a treat. Unfortunately Apple does not have an answer to this yet on the market. Replacing laptops in enterprise with Macs is another thing altogether, as it can connect Windows Terminal Services (Via RDC Application) and be a great reliable work horse on the road. That is just my thoughts

Not a chance.

[Lumpy]

Honestly the osX product is far better in a corperation than windows but it's the apps that rule.

All the little expensive sales,marketing and billing apps are windows based. These companies that make this vertical market crap cant program for windows properly, porting to osx would be impossible for them

I am ignoring things like outlook and the other staples, Most businesses live for the vertical apps for their industry. Engineering needs Autocad, Marketing needs their apps, CableTv needs their special CableTv apps. etc...

Until you port all that, you cant get the "apple penetration".

Re:Yes and Maybe No

[UnknowingFool]

but what about the cost of training a whole enterprise of users on MacOSX.

I would think that there is a training cost of migrating to Vista. It may not be as dramatic as from XP to OS X, but there is a cost. Also you would gain cost saving due to less maintenance of fewer viruses, malware, etc. Finally, any training cost may be offset by the loss in productivity due to Vista [slashdot.org] as well as all time users will spend clicking on prompts.

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Allow.

One show stopper

[nurb432]

Microsoft pulling MSO ( and native exchange ) support for Apple.

Pretend as much as you want that there are 'alternatives and i dont need it', but MSO *is* the de-facto standard out there. Without it, Apple will continue to be a niche player in the business world for a long time to come ( if not forever, unless things radically change someday ).

But is being a ( rather large ) niche player really all that bad? They still make great products and make gobs of money. Do they *need* to attack Microsoft's stranglehold on the corporate market?

Re:I've always thought

[Hawthorne01]

But do the vast majority of enterprise users need more than MS Office (or the equivalent thereof), a calender/organizer, email, and a browser? Now, in the IT Department, I can see the need, but most business computers are little more than dumb terminals.

Not ready for "enterprise."

[misleb]

I like using OS X on the desktop and all, but I'll be the first to admit that OS X is not ready for the "enterprise." Things one might take for granted on Windows such as ODBC are very poorly implemented on OS X. Other examples where Apple is lagging behind is their supposed "directory services." Yeah, it is LDAP, so technically it is a directory (hierarchial), but for the most part it still acts like an NT domains. That is, it is basically a flat user/group space. Workgroup Manager does not work well with large user sets. It is not at all suited for larger corp environments where you might have a large directory with partitions and such that span WAN links. Although I have not personally used Active Directory much personally (I'm an old Netware/NDS/eDirectory guy), I get the feeling that is much more mature and featureful than OpenDirectory.

Heck, Apple has only just very recently adopted ACLs for filesystem permissions... and they are still pretty clunky to manage. Like you can't just go to a folder on a server and "Get Info" and check permissions inheritance and such. You have to go through Workgroup Manager or figure out how to use long chmod strings.

The list goes on and on. I think Apple is going to remain the "odd man out" in corporate environments. At least until Leopard. We'll see what Apple comes up with then, but Apple still seems to be focused on home/niche professional users. I don't see it becoming a general office platform for some time.

-matthew

what a joke

[malevolentjelly]

I can't believe people are celebrating the onslaught of the only software giant with more proprietary vendor lock-in and questionable business practices than Microsoft. And then there's the practical application- it's like people forgot MS Office and Visual Studio existed...

How is this remotely cost effective or practical? This is like recommending that UPS start using Lexus SUV's to deliver packages...

Vista desktops fall right into microsoft-powered corporate networks the same way XP does... it's not the "same thing" to "upgrade" to OSX... you're talking about scrapping ALL hardware rather than simply upgrading or replacing your weakest workstations. Businesses can move up to Vista gradually or sequentially- especially since all the Office and Productivity suite runs on either- switching to Apple or Linux would be NIGHT and DAY.

This post is clearly FUD, feeding off of the wild anti-microsoft hysteria on this site.

Re:Our Business

[Kris_J]

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.

Bingo. And a lot of us are also stuck with Dell contracts because they're the cheapest "name brand" Windows PCs (or some such).

Most corporate users don't need a whole computer

[Logic Bomb]

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.

Re:This topic perenially arises

[Greyfox]

The "Technology Road Map" issue is a red herring. The question is do you want to play with Jobs, who plays his cards close to his vest or do you want to play with Bill Gates, who's bluffing wildly and never shows the hand he says he has? Microsoft's technology "Road Map" is essentially the same strategy IBM perfected back in the day -- announce a blue sky set of features for the next product to keep the customers waiting on that nifty new technology and then deliver a quarter of the announced features a couple of years past the initial announced release date. Planning an IT strategy is no easier with Microsoft than it is with Apple.

Besides, most IT departments aren't riding that bleeding edge. They buy or lease their machines, use 'em for a few years and then do a new round of buying. They don't have to upgrade their hardware for that shiny new thing Jobs announced yesterday. The old systems will still be viable for some time no matter what new geegaws are coming out on the newest hardware. And you have a clear upgrade path to any other UNIX if Darwin takes a turn you don't like.

Re:Are you sure?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

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."

WRONG! [jt.org]

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

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?

This has been my problem with big Linux deployments. If you want badly managed client end-points, go ahead.

Don't try this at home.

Re:Indeed

[fyngyrz]

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:Are you sure?

[complete loony]

Once you've got the MAC hardware, with windows dual booting or in a VM, you can slowly rework those applications that need to be, where it is appropriate. It's not going to happen overnight, and in some companies it's certainly not worth doing. But that doesn't make it impossible.

Re:I'd like to see

[Bastian]

"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.

Biggest Challenge for Apple in Corporate Market Is

[Glasswire]

...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.

Sole Source Supplier

[chill]

Many larger corporations and governments are loathe to go with sole-source suppliers. If Dell screws up, there are a dozen other suppliers to get computers from. If Apple screws up, then you're screwed. No one other than Apple sells those machines.

Smaller companies and schools may be able to get away with this, but I'd never recommended it for any large company I was working for.

Now, I'd have no problem recommending OS X if it ran properly and was supported on non-Apple hardware...

Re:This topic perenially arises

[ThousandStars]

They do have an enterprise sales division that still doesn't do most of the things I'm describing and only *really* works well if you're deploying thousands of Macs at once. If you buy even a dozen a month, they're not much use.

I'm also not sure your generalizations fly. From the board I read -- Ars Technica's -- most people who *do* actually manage Macs in large environments haven't seen much Improvement. See, e.g., here [arstechnica.com] and here [arstechnica.com] and here [arstechnica.com] and here [arstechnica.com] for a variety of threads discussing the issue. Every time OS X.n+1 is about to arrive, so do threads wondering if this is the time for OS X in the enterprise. Look in particular for the posts of a guy named dhaveconfig, who manages a uni setup in Australia and is well-versed in Apple's various enterprise failings.

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.

This is true, but you STILL have to jump through Apple's hoops and you STILL don't get many of the things I cited in my original post. To be sure, Apple is looking better in the enterprise than they have in the past, but that's more an accident than anything else, and more a result of dividends from their other strategies. And "better" in this circumstance just means, "not as abysmal as they used to be," which is hardly an accolade.

What?

[Colin Smith]

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:Are you sure?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

My experience of .MIL is that, regarding cost control, they have a different reality than business.

Re:Most corporate users don't need a whole compute

[Colin Smith]

I don't understand why do you think why dumb terminals will have a come back. Dumb terminals are considered deprecated since the late 80's

By the ignorant perhaps. And cost is the reason.

2-300 ms. I understand that maintaining a single server is much easier than maintaining hundreds of desktops, but I think that would really decrease the work efficiency of the people using it. Does a server even scale to support several hundred simultaneous graphic terminal clients?M/quote>

300ms? What kind of network are you talking about? Wet string? Anyone on a 100Mbit full duplex switched network will have response times indistinguishable from a local workstation, Citrix or X11. In fact it'll be faster for everything but the most graphically intense applications.

It's easy to get hold of a server which will happily run several hundred clients, with horsepower to spare. Though a single big machine is the expensive way to do it, several smaller much cheaper machines will have better characteristics, going to thousands of clients is just as simple.

 

We're doing it

[theolein]

My company is slowly switching to an all Mac environment. Three years ago, we were considering moving all our clients to Windows and using Linux servers. Fortunately, reason prevailed and we stuck with Macs, despite using a crusty old Irix server serving Appletalk. Last year, through company growth, we had moved to a mainly Mac shop and we are, after major consideration, moving our file and backup servers over to XServe and OSX. (Sadly we still have an utterly insane group of Gentoo servers doing the rest of the serving with included downtime because the person responsible thinks doing untested upgrades on production servers is a good idea)

The biggest problem, as the article says, is not Apple's hardware or software, but the entrenched and encrusted Microsoft/Linux anti-Mac prejudice and the lack of professional support options.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Apple isn't appealing to Corporations

[fyngyrz]

OO isn't officially a native Aqua application

Oh, come on! We're not talking about a bunch of geeky UI nazis, we're talking about people who need to get work done. OO works fine on a Mac, Aqua is 100% irrelevant - it's just eye candy. The windows open on the desktop, the programs are 100% functional, work transparently within the Mac filesystem - trust me, no one who has to write a letter or build a spreadsheet or hook a database into a report is looking at how "gemmy" the widgets are or bitching about the rendering of the title bar, or freaking out because the menus aren't all jammed into Aqua's top-of-screen location. These things are worth a single instance of "oh, so that's how this works" and nothing else. Not if they want to keep their job around here, anyway.

The only legitimate bitch I hear is from the people we got Powerbooks for; the two-finger mouse emulation doesn't do a good enough job (there are mousing ops you can't do with it) and for those people, we just hand them a real mouse and they go back to work quietly, problem solved. Though I am perfectly willing to call this an Apple foul-up; two buttons have demonstrated a great deal of usefulness for a long, long time now, and Apple is just being needlessly stubborn about the portables. They'd be well advised to put a keypad in the Macbook Pros, too. Lot of space going to speakers that sound like they're in a bag made of tinfoil anyway.

Apple makes it hard...

[hhr]

Apple's business practices make it difficult for a large corporation to widely adopt Apple computers. Notice how, to get maximum hype, Apple reveales nothing about their future plans. Then one magic day every few months Steve Jobs get's up on the podium and says "The new giga-flux apple server is now being manufactured and will be available in two months!" Crowd goes ga-ga. The computer, while great, has relativly limited configuration options. Because it has to work.

Large corporations need to plan out their PC purchases over time spans measured in years. What kind of commputers will Apple sell next year? Ask Steve, but he isn't talking. What if I need configuration option X and Apple doesn't support it? Well then, you are SOL.

Re:why not?

[jellomizer]

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:It's already happening

[!eopard]

If you need to work outside the office, you get a work laptop and take that home. NEVER connect a home computer to your corporate network. That would be like wandering into the seedy part of town and grabbing a random prositiute for unprotected sex. Waaaay too much risk.

Re:Paradigm-shift.

[mgabrys_sf]

Lookout - you might get modded into a troll or have some comment thrown around about your mother.

It's been 10 - fucking - years, and GIMP still sucks shit. I don't think another 10 is going to help. This would be called the results from the wonderful world of software design by committee. Either that - or perhaps no-one working on the damn thing actually knows crap about design, or how designers work. I suspect all of the above. I tried using it for a real project less than a year ago after first diddling with it in 1996. It's still got an interface only a mother could love.

And there's only one thing worse than GIMP - it's GIMP evangelists. Oh boy - are they a pile of funsies or what? What? WORK with PHOTOSHOP? Oh nosies! DRM! Copy protection! Watermarks! The sky is falling!

Re:Are you sure?

[RotHorseKid]

"Windows on the hardware it's designed for (read: everything works correctly)"

You must be joking.

Re:Are you sure?

[Gr8Apes]

For all of MAD's suckyness (Microsoft Active Directory ...MAD delivers functionality that OS X can't even dream of.

Example:
You can send your admin-monkey to the server, with a few manual procedure steps, ...from using a DOS command shell.

This configuration change will go out on the network with the next reboot. And poof! 500 nosy, troublesome Users are now a bit less able to shoot themselves in the foot, or work mischief on your systems.

First, I love the MAD acronym. :)

Secondly, here's a question for you: does OSX even require this functionality, or is it merely a consequence of the MS world-view that this functionality seems to be required?

Let's look at your example, and let me admit I've not used OSX in an enterprise setting, but I have used Solaris, HPUX, Linux, and AIX in enterprise settings and all are *nix variants like OSX. First, you have to image all your drives - that's standard across all systems. Next, you have central servers with user profile information on them on one variant or another (again, standard in this scenario). With the *nix variants, the user home directories can be NFS mounted, with every machine giving you the same view instantly, with the same performance as you'd experience on any other machine. Unless ADS has changed, I believe a new profile is downloaded/updated on every login/logoff, and is slower than molasses if your system is configured with or default/user stores large files on the desktop or in the profile. Also, should I want to change run perms, I change it on the server(s) and voila - INSTANT changes in what users can do - no logoff/login cycle required. Now, OSX being a *nix variant, can probably be setup exactly the same way (The only uncertainty remains because I haven't done it nor experienced it first hand).

Other examples: disable the IE address bar. (and prevent Trojans from hooking it). Disable the Tools menu so users can't mung with the security settings in IE. Disable control panels. Enforce a password-protected screen saver across the enterprise. Take the File-Open menu away from MS Excel. Whatever. I assure you, as draconian and capricious as these sound - some of them are ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to operate computers in a secure environment.

These are all windows centric issues, however, given the above configuration with NFS mounts, applications can be controlled in exactly the same way. General users don't have access to system settings in network *nix environments without a super user password. Your strawmen don't exist in a standard *nix rollout.

...But the effort required to "roll your own" system to manage client configuration on this scale, with this ease of use, would be on a pretty much unimaginable level.

I'm afraid you're mistaken on that. See below:

I am an unashamed Mac fanboy. The bane of my life is when I have to go into work, and fix broken Domain Policies or MAD server. I have 4 Macs at home, and I try to manage them somewhat like an enterprise - and I'm telling you - the tools just are not there. There *is* a usable infrastructure, but you'd need to pump tens of thousands of man-hours from a very skilled scripting guru to pull off the equivalent thing on a Mac.

I think you'll find that with a half-way knowledgeable *nix system administrator that more than half your issues will go away, and a decent one will make 95% of your issues evaporate. You're still seeing the world through MS glasses. You expect systems to work like MS systems. MS systems are standalone systems that sort of communicate (badly) through networks, since networks were after thoughts. *nix systems were designed with networks (well, multiple terminals/multi-user systems which were much easier to convert to network centric systems) in mind and thus have a completely different view of networked systems.

I have actually used OSX OD

[theolein]

Man, organise a trial of OSX server with Open Directory before you start speaking your prejudices out loud. OD can do exactly that, since you can replicate a thusly configured configuration to all your users. OD is, on top of that, compatible with AD and NDS, and openLDAP, for that matter.