The Mac: coming to an enterprise near you

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 15 January 2008 03:11

IT Industry - Market

Significantly, support for Mac is now official Cisco IT policy. Acosta added: "For the first time in quite a while, Macs are again an orderable laptop option for Cisco employees."

He also noted that Cisco is ramping up support for OS X in its own product offerings. "Cisco has invested significantly in supporting the Mac in the enterprise with our products. Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, our next-generation unified communications client, was developed in parallel on both Mac and Windows. It is a fully native Mac application with a user-interface developed specifically for the platform."

The just released latest version of the Personal Communicator client, according to Acosta, comes with full localisation on both Windows and Mac and support for Leopard.

And, as my colleague Alex Zaharov-Reutt has pointed out, it's now a low risk option for an enterprise to buy a Mac or two. "The ability to run Windows XP or Vista natively, or at the same time using virtualisation software from VMware or Parallels, gives Windows users the safety net that the Mac can actually run all their Windows software if they want to at full speed and with full compatibility."

Now, all that's needed is one or two high profile enterprises switching to Mac and being very public about the benefits; and perhaps a revival of TCO comparisons betweens Windows and Mac to really start the ball rolling.