“Apple’s success in the home and education markets has led to burgeoning grassroots demand for Macs in many organizations, since more and more recent college graduates have Mac backgrounds these days. At Georgetown University Law Center, nearly 50 percent of the students are using Macs, up from less than 1 percent a few years ago, says CIO Pablo Molina,” Robert L. Mitchell reports for Computerworld.
“Guido Sacchi, CIO and senior vice president of corporate strategies at CompuCredit, decided to go with the flow. He’s allowing Macintoshes into the business when the requester makes a valid business case. ‘If they think they can get better productivity on a Mac, so be it. Who am I to stop them?’ he says,” Mitchell reports.
“Sacchi’s attitude is a tacit acknowledgment that innovative technologies and those offering “superior user experience” are evolving in the home market, not the business arena. ‘The winning strategy is about providing tools to the users that pretty much resemble what they’re doing at home,’ he says,” Mitchell reports.
“This ‘consumerization of IT’ is leading Apple into the enterprise, albeit through the back door, says Gartner analyst Charles Smulders,” Mitchell reports. “However, might this also signal the stirrings of a bigger change — a Mac insurrection at the enterprise level?”
Full article here.
I think with the advent of the iPhone to the enterprise, anything is possible. But I don’t think Apple is looking to serious at enterprise sales, if it did, it would already have more of a foothold.
Ordering our Xserve this week! All workstations will be Macs. Yup, Apple’s making headway in the enterprise.
Surprisingly left unsaid is the reality that todays consumer Macs and PC are far more powerful than the mainframe, and other big iron, that initiated the rise of corporate IT departments. I think this really changes the dynamics of how IT personnel can or need to dictate much of the of the policies needed in the past.
The Xserve will meet some business needs but they recently discontinued the Xserve RAID. Business growth will be mostly be in handhelds and laptops.
Grassroots will soon turn into bushes !!!
In the corporate world there are many companies using PC’s as terminals to talk To an IBM AS400 Mainframe using an emulation software program. And with that in mind the IT department when asked about using Mac’s they say “can’t do that Mac’s can’t talk to the Mainframe. So un-true Mocha MacX TN5250 is a great emulation software product that works better than any PC version emulation software. If all companies would only switch over to Mac’s they could save a bundle, no IT department.
Cool! Maybe they’ll bring back this ad.
After reading the article, its easy to see how businesses get themselves into trouble. They have no real clue as to what is going on.
Why would Apple want to lower its margins to next to nothing to compete with HP and Dell for being a windows platform??? The companies that really look at total cost can see that Macs run cheaper and work better, but ….geee…..look at all the money they have spent on Windblows junk….. And purchasing like to haggle and buy those really cheap machines where IT then buys all the upgrade parts and puts the machine together in house. It saves money,,,, right??? LOL
Sorry guys This just goes to show you that Macs getting into business will be a 5-10 year thing, but when the workers quit putting up with the Windblows problems, workers are going to get their Macs. Not all at once… Not for a while. But eventurally.
en
“Guido Sacchi…”
Thought it said Guido Sarduchi or a sec. I always wondered what happened to him.
Spark, those big-iron systems have grown a bit as well. My first “big iron” was a 16-bit, 64K room full of equipment … and not all that powerful. But it replaced a couple dozen ‘clerks’ – even after accounting for the folks needed to feed and coddle it. That was in the late 60s. Sure, my G5 is 64-bit (I think), as is the latest MacPro, and RAM is no longer any sort of limitation, and it isn’t all that big … and it is fairly powerful. Today’s big iron still fills a room, still requires AC, and still makes my small tower – as well as the 8-core current version – seem slow.
More Macs are entering the Enterprise today because a) making a business case is easier and b) fewer IT types are foolish enough to throw FUD at them. If the C*O wants one, or the graphics/web/advertising/etc department wants them (and will forgo “support”), they get them.
Dave
To 7over:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Guido_Sarducci
It always amazes me to read how, “If only IT departments would just switch over to Apple, all their problems would go away.” Such fantasy. No one reading the entire article linked here could possibly come away with any other conclusion, unless you’re drunk on Cupertino Kool-Aid. Have any of you ever worked in a real IT environment? I’m not talking about 5, 10 or 20 Mac systems in some publishing house, I’m talking about organizations with hundreds and thousands of client systems, applications and servers. Apple is non-existent in the larger organizations for one important reason; they just don’t care about the enterprise market because it doesn’t fit their carefully crafted business model.
And I can’t say I blame them. Doing what they do now, they get to have much higher margins on their entire line of consumer goods and they don’t have to incur the support costs associated with large deployment customers, nor offer developers and support groups the necessary resources to maintain a viable presence in the market.
If you really like using Apple products and want them to maintain their laser-like focus on your Mac-user experience, the last thing you want them to do is start playing in the realm of corporate computing.
Historically, “Coming in the back door” is the only way progress occurs in IT.
The Apple II & Visicalc, the original IBM PC, the original BlackBerry, etc. – they’re all examples.
When the people lead, the the IT leaders follow!
@Ampar:
Although Apple discontinued their XServe RAID product, they changed their XServe so that it can use any third party RAID product, I believe, which cancels the need for the XServe RAID line. I imagine the profit margins on the RAID product was not large enough to justify.
Macs will enter the enterprise market slowly, and I suspect the largest corporate users (those whose PC needs are basically little more than dummy terminals) will be the last, if ever, to buy Macs. While Macs can run Windows, it’s not as convenient as running Windows w/o virtualization, and it adds complexity to the worker’s PC. Plus, when you’re buying 100,000 PCs, $100 price difference per PC adds up pretty quickly.
Apple’s not going to forsake quality or profit margins just to sell more units, like Dell, HP, etc. have done. Therefore, there will be markets in which Macs simply won’t be competitive, regardless of the other benefits a Mac provides.
More nonsense.
Trust your IT department—they know what’s best. They have Microsoft certifications and really nifty ways to make purchasing recommendations based on relevant calculations and studies. Only MBA’s come close when it comes to business acumen.
Let me spell it out for you MAC dorks: cheap hardware combined with magnificent Microsoft software is best for the enterprise. Don’t even question it. And don’t give me that “I’m a PC user at work because I <u>have</u> to, and a MAC user at home because I <u>want</u> to” crap. Nobody believes it. If you use Microsoft stuff at work of course you’re gonna want to use it at home.
Your potential. Our passion.™
Thanks, bizlaw. Interesting post.
Zune Tang
You normally make me laugh, but your starting to slip with your feedback. Put more effort in. Its much more enjoyable to read when your feedback appears genuine.
At this point in time, only ignorance and a basic lack of intelligence can prevent the Mac from making its mark in the enterprise. This is not to say that cluelessness and stupidity are not in plentiful supply in the corporate world. As for IT types: They can hardly be expected to praise the Mac when its popularity clearly threatens their meal tickets. Translation: On the subject of Macintosh computers, you can’t believe a word they say.
> He’s allowing Macintoshes into the business when the requester makes a valid business case.
I want to use a Mac instead of Windows.
– OK, state your business case.
Well, I don’t have to restart my Mac more than once every few weeks. And I don’t have to waste time installing anti-malware software. That improves my productivity.
– Approved. Next person in line…!
I read this from the article & send a copy to MDN although someone else or them perhaps clued them in. No big deal but I would’ve thought they’d catch this very obvious but common misconception of Macs: “Usually, Macs are more expensive when the purchase price and cost of support are factored in, Sacchi says.” Hmm, did he/they miss this one that Computerworld posted? Probably so since the original article has a negative headline. MDN’s take: After some myth-busting, Auto Warehousing Co. proceeds with plan to dump Windows PCs for Apple: Macshttp://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/16579/
One of the best reasons to do so? “..more than $1.82 million the company calculates it will save over the next three years.” Basically, yeah it’s a little more cost upfront & maybe a little tedious at first but ultimately they will get way more than what they pay for and for the long term not just in the short which lots of business mistakenly do everyday.
ken1w – what he said.
Peace.
@ Another IT Guy
Darwin on which OSX is based is open source any UNIX hack could maintain a system of a few thousand mac clients. The problem is the ubiquitousnes of MS junk and patch work created whole schools of training in bad habits and how to maintain kludge systems with workarounds until the next big service pack comes out. Without that unecessary overhead any enterprise system would have been better off. NO viruses, better security. easier administration, think of how many millions business could have saved and have been more productive ?