Is Apple Gaining Ground In The Enterprise?

Apple is steadily making inroads with enterprises due to the Mac's strong reputation for security and reliability, according to new research from ITIC and Sunbelt Software.

In a worldwide survey of more than 700 corporations, ITIC and Sunbelt found that 77 percent use Macs, and 23 percent have more than 50 Macs in their networks. However, 68 percent plan to allow their employees to use Mac as their work desktops in the next year, according to the survey.

The survey also found that 70 percent of companies rated the security of OS X 10.x as "excellent" or "very good," while 82 percent assigned the same rating to the reliability of Mac hardware and OS X 10.x.

But Apple solution providers say there's another force at work here: The industry's deep-seated negative perceptions of Windows Vista. According to the survey, just 10 percent of companies have migrated to Vista, with 88 percent indicating that they're still running XP as their primary desktop OS.

"Vista's problems opened up a lot of interest in alternate platforms, especially at the desktop level," said Nick Gold, senior account executive with Chesapeake Systems, a Baltimore-based Apple specialist. "As a result, more and more IT departments are looking at upgrading to OS X instead of Vista."

John Strikwerda, retail manager at Carbon Computing, a Kitchener, Ontario-based Apple reseller, said Macs are "really starting to resonate" with IT departments. "The most popular office and business productivity apps are available on the Mac platform, and now Macs also have the capability of running the Windows OS natively," he said.

But John Eaton, president of Eaton & Associates, a San Francisco-based solution provider, hasn't seen a noticeable increase in Macs being purchased by enterprise clients, although he agrees that Vista's problems have created a window of opportunity for Apple to gain enterprise market share.

"There is still a question around value with Macs, especially when you need to add a product like Fusion or Parallels to get minimum functionality," Eaton said.

If OS X 10.6 (a.k.a. Snow Leopard) resolves the problems some users have had with Microsoft Exchange, enterprise Mac adoption could see a major increase, Eaton added.

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