Apple’s corporate share grows

As you fire up your PC for another day's grind, do you wonder why you can't use a Mac? Studies consistently show Apple's platform is more intuitive, easier to use and allows people to be more productive.

There is also the non-trivial matter of having a platform where you don't have to worry about viruses and spyware.

But corporate IT departments seem to think they have to work for a living. They distrust Apple's ease, preferring instead the guaranteed grind of maintaining acres of Windows machines.

Apple must take some of the blame for having only a tiny share of the corporate computing market. It bucks standard industry practice and refuses to release technology road maps of its future releases, which are used by organisations to plan their future IT spend.

It also suffered from Microsoft's dominance of the operating system market, as many smaller applications vendors stopped developing for the Mac because they could not justify the additional expense.

But Apple is starting to regain a share of the corporate market.

It is building up a dedicated sales force and taking on new resellers. Its new server and storage products have given it competitive options, and the new Mac Mini is a credible option for many organisations' next PC refresh.

David Olliver, who heads Apple distributor Renaissance's corporate and government team, says new sales are usually solution-driven, with customers wanting to see a combination of hardware and software to meet their specific needs.

"The X-Serve is of interest to people who have used Windows servers and have struggled with the ongoing support costs and the number of patches and virus issues they have to deal with," Olliver says.

Worm and virus attacks such as Blaster and Sasser mean some firms have brought in Macs to ensure the email always gets through.

"The GUI [graphical user interface] allows us to put the server into schools, which are usually a cross-platform environment with both Macs and PCs, and it can be maintained by a staff member or support person who doesn't need to get under the hood or have high-level technical skills to keep everything working," Olliver says.

"The same goes for small businesses where there is not a lot of IT resource. They can have some serious tools to work with yet be shielded from complexity.

"There is another group of customers who come from an Open Source, Unix or Linux background. They feel comfortable with it and can dive into the command line or take advantage of the Mac GUI ."

Mac OSX looks familiar to those users because it is built on a core of BSD Unix, the version of Unix developed at the University of California Berkeley, and the server version includes many powerful Open Source system management tools.

The Apple server bundle of an Xserve with a single 2GHz G5 processor and an unlimited client licence costs $5320 plus GST.

"That means as many Mac, Windows or Linux machines as the server can handle," Olliver says.

"In the New Zealand environment that means you can hang off hundreds of client machines and not have to pay additional licence fees."

A high-performance cluster node, a similar pizza box-sized server with two 2.3 GHz G5 processors, costs the same but comes with only a 10-client licence.

Bio-informatics is the key market for the cluster nodes, with a US company called The Bio Team aggregating 200 bio-informatics applications optimised for Mac hardware.

Pre-press, design agencies, large publishing houses and video production firms continue to be core markets for Apple.

But companies with large libraries of photos or videos are starting to buy Apple's XServe RAID storage.

A one terabyte RAID server costs just under $11,000, making it one of the more economical storage systems available, and 5.6 TB can be had for a mere $23,430.

"The data throughput of many of the small design or graphics agencies is phenomenal," says Olliver. "It is not unusual for a company with seven to 10 users to be throwing 200 Gb of data across the network every day. Many large corporates wouldn't be seeing that volume.

Darius Mistry, managing director of Auckland reseller Imagetext, says his company is starting to break out of its main niche of selling into the print, publication and graphics industries.

"We are slowly being invited into corporates looking for a cross-platform solution," Mistry says.

"Quite a few businesses put Apples in their marketing divisions, and they bring us in to integrate them."

He says compatibility issues have disappeared. There is no longer a price difference between Apple machines and PCs, and solution vendors are attracted because of the Unix-based operating system.

"In storage, the Xserve RAID is the most economical storage solution in the industry for data byte per dollar spend."