Corporate Mac Sales Surge 66% 494
syngularyx writes "Mac sales in the enterprise during Apple's last fiscal quarter grew a whopping 66 percent, significantly outpacing the rest of the PC market, which grew just 4.5 percent in the enterprise. The data from Apple's previous fiscal quarter was highlighted on Friday by analyst Charlie Wolf with Needham & Company. He said though he originally viewed success in the enterprise as a "one-quarter blip," it now appears to be a "durable platform" for Apple."
What makes this especially interesting is that Apple apparently isn't looking for corporate sales, and considers them "collateral success" rather than an indication that they should market specifically to corporate buyers.
Figures (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm not sure where they're getting these numbers from, because the IDC Graph [appleinsider.com] they're re-printing shows business sales going from ~870,000 in Q4 2010 to ~890,000 in Q1 2011. Now I'm no mathematician, but that doesn't look like a 66% increase to me.
Not a Surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Corporate sales? (Score:1, Interesting)
I know of a couple of offices in NYC that do the same. The iMacs were bought because they are aesthetically pleasing, however the business software is windows only and is ran in a VM on the system. A lot of effort and money went into designing the entire office and the extra cost of the macs makes sense in my opinion. You don't buy a luxury car and then cover the seats with ratty old t-shirts.
Re:Collateral success vs indication of support nee (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I would bet heavily that the increase is tied strongly to one simple thing – everyone wants to develop an iOS app.
Re:Collateral success vs indication of support nee (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Collateral success vs indication of support nee (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's an example of the different levels of support that we got from Apple and from Dell when a machine failed in the university lab where I used to work:
Dell sent out a technician to fix it. He brought spare parts with him, and fixed it on the spot. We weren't paying for an expensive support contract - just the standard support Dell gives to large customers - so it sometimes took a day or two before they sent someone out. The machine was out of action for a day or two, and a technician had to spend about 10 minutes on the phone to get it repaired.
Apple kept us on hold or about half an hour, before telling us that we had to take the machine to the nearest Apple Authorised Reseller. The nearest one to Swansea was in Cardiff, which is about an hour and a half's drive away (city centre to city centre), plus a little walk at each end since you couldn't park near the shop in Cardiff. The would then send it to their repair centre, who would take up to three weeks to fix it. Once it was fixed, it had to be collected from there. Machine was out of action for three weeks, and it effectively took an entire day of technician time (two round trips to another city with the machine) to get it fixed.
Somewhat strangely, Mac owned by individuals bought through the Higher Education store got much better support. They sent out a box the next day, you put the broken machine in it, and a day or two later it returned working (normally - I had one experience where it took them a month to admit that they'd lost it, then two attempts to send me a working replacement). For some parts, they send the replacement out, and you put the old one in the box and send it back with the courier when it arrives.
Re:Collateral success vs indication of support nee (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, Apple does have enterprise support options: You just have to know where to look [apple.com] (and don't let the "server" page name fool you - OS support sits right at the top of the page).
IT hates apple (Score:5, Interesting)
Anecdotal experience from my company (Score:5, Interesting)
"in the beginning", I was the one corporate Mac user (by special agreement/dispensation/employment agreement with the CEO.) Then a couple of Macs were purchased for specific projects, plus a couple other 'favorite sons' got a Mac. Once the senior leadership (including the CIO and COO) actually -tried them-, they decided that the convenience/ease of use of the software platform, along with the reliability of the hardware, was A Good Thing. So the corporate policy was still "No Macs", but they became in some respects a status simple at the VP level. Then the CFO said "no Macs". But with a significant number of VPs advocating for the Mac (including the ability to connect to the corporate Exchange server, and the ability to run corporate Windows-only applications through virtualization), is likely to result a re-look in the "no Macs" policy. A big part of that is that the hardware's lasting a lot longer. If a Dell breaks in 2 years and a Mac lasts 4, and the price for SIMILARLY EQUIPPED machines is relatively close, then the Total Cost Of Ownership argument for Macs is a strong one.
But we're talking about 20 machines in a 500 person company, so Mac penetration here is not very strong. The level of interest at the VP and senior tech staff level remains high. And typically that's what I've seen in several other companies; the 'desire for Macs' is particularly strong in the senior technical ranks. In my case specifically, and in the case of others I've talked to, it's a combination of ease-of-use for everyday tasks, hardware reliability, and the lack of IT controls and interference (e.g. corporate-injected software updates that crash your machine in the middle of working or worrying about the latest crop of vulnerabilities.) Also for many of us, the Unix underpinnings provides a lot of capabilities for tools we grew up with (e.g. grep, chmod, EMACS, etc) that are often highly productive alternatives to the Windows way of doing things.
Re:Collateral success vs indication of support nee (Score:2, Interesting)
Hello,
I work at a Fortune-20 company, where I am currently writing our internal standards for the Mac OS X platform, and developing the infrastructure necessary to support Mac OS X in any of the 3000+ business locations we maintain across North America.
We've had no problem getting support from Apple for all things related to Mac OS X and iOS, for the low cost of $nothing. If we run into a problem, I send our Apple Strategic Accounts representative an email about it, and an Apple systems engineer gets back to me with the answer, or asking for more information in order to get me the answer. Many things require no contact, such as the ease of scriptability in order to configure the Mac in a location-aware way using the Active Directory sites and services information we already have, join the AD domain and participate in Kerberos single sign-on, maintain accurate inventory and asset information using systems already in place for Windows XP and Windows 7, and deploy applications dynamically based upon user needs without killing our WAN.
I assure you that there has been no 'rude awakening' throughout the process.
Thanks.
Re:Corporate sales? (Score:4, Interesting)
The base config is pretty OK priced. There are some gotchas, though:
Yes, I sorta regret getting that iMac a few years ago.
Back on topic:
I see a good business model in becoming a certified Mac shop and offering corporate service deals (tech support + physical service). Slowly but surely, the walls are being torn down as applications are becoming web applications. HTML5 may make the OS completely irrelevant in a few year's time.
Re:Collateral success vs indication of support nee (Score:1, Interesting)
I work as a consultant to many Fortune 100 companies and I'm seeing this happen at most of them. Acceptance of OS X and a serious interest in bring-your-own computer schemes is happening in all of them.
Re:Managers Had It at Home (Score:4, Interesting)
Being an employee of a major corporation, I'd offer a different theory. I've watched us go from no-Macs to maybe 100 Macs in the past quarter. It has nothing to do "I have a Mac at home". It has everything to do with iOS development. iPhones and iPads are now supported devices in the enterprise. We can now receive our corporate email on iOS devices, where previously this was restricted to BlackBerry devices.
As a result, internal corporate applications are being developed in iOS. The iPad in particular is attractive as a business tool. Carrying one to a corporate meeting is as easy as carrying a notebook, and the company doesn't even have to pay for the hardware because many people already bring their own to work.
Since Apple has created a situation where you can only develop for iOS on OSX, voila, we have a large number of OSX machines by necessity.