The Mac: coming to an enterprise near you

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 15 January 2008 03:11

IT Industry - Market

The pundits are falling over themselves trying to upstage Steve Jobs and predict what the big news from Apple will be in his keynote speech, but while its unlikely to be a headline news item at Macworld, the re-entry of the Mac into the mainstream of enterprise IT could be one of the most important Mac developments of 2008. To his list of predictions for Macworld , the senior editor of US Macworld Magazine, Dan Frakes, has added: "The debut of Leopard, along with a general dissatisfaction with Windows Vista, will open doors for the Mac in the enterprise market. In fact, we'll see a few major US companies switch to the Mac platform - some gradually, but at least a couple in a major public migration. We'll also see a resurgence of the Mac platform in higher education."

Time was when the Mac was a serious contender for the enterprise market. Back in 1991 when Australia's second carrier Optus came was starting from scratch, it was an all Mac shop. That philosophy, unfortunately did not survive the first significant change of ownership about three years later.

At one time the Mac received considerable support as an enterprise IT tool from various market analysts who, higher hardware costs notwithstanding, calculated that ease of use and lower support put the Mac well ahead on total cost of ownership. Nobody, so far as I am aware, does those comparisons anymore because the battle seemed to have been lost years ago. So what are the chances of a comeback?

Given his role, Frakes deserves to be taken seriously, but perhaps more important signals are coming from networking giant Cisco. Commenting favourably on Frakes' forecast on one of the company's blog sites , M Michael Acosta, manager engineering, said it "resonated with what I'm seeing at some of our customers and within Cisco. Just a few years ago within Cisco, Macs were conspicuous mostly in their absence. Today, it is not unusual to find an increasing number of Apple logos across from me in meetings."