Adam Gifford: Enterprise takes a bite from the Apple

As we look back over the Easter season, with its iconography of suffering and despair followed by hope and revival, we can contemplate also that great religious war, Mac vs PC.

That's not an attempt at blasphemy or subscribing to the Steve Jobs as messiah meme, but rather a nod to Umberto Eco's theory that Macintosh is Catholic and Microsoft's DOS (which still lurks under Windows) is Protestant.

As Eco put it, the Mac "is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory ... The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

"DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: Far away from the baroque community of revellers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment."

In the past that great Protestant institution, the modern workplace, has excluded the Mac on grounds of cost, security, complexity.

Those doctrines have been fundamentally undermined by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance, a group which works on technologies that streamline the deployment, integration and management of the Mac in Windows-managed IT environments.

Its survey of 260 IT administrators from large organisations with both Macs and PCs found Macs are less expensive than PCs to manage.

Almost a third said their organisations bought Macs because of they were cheaper to own, once factors like support, ease of use, software licensing fees and eventual resale price were taken into account.

Chris Parnell, the general manager enterprise at Apple distributor Renaissance, says Apple technologies are moving past their traditional core markets of media and design, video and audio.

A lot of that is down to a big shift in the way we use technology in the workplace.

"What the iPhone and other smartphones have done worldwide is open the door for Apple in the enterprise," Parnell says.

Executives buy iPhones and want the device to be supported on corporate networks. iPhone and iPod sales have also driven sales of Apple laptops and desktops for consumer use.

"We are getting top-level management who use Macs at home putting them in the business for productivity reasons.

"We are also seeing it from the bottom end, with students coming out of university and wanting to keep using Macs in their jobs."

Some IT organisations have retooled so their networks become device agnostic as far as the user interface is concerned.

"We are seeing technology funding, like car allowance - the staffer is given an allowance to buy the device of their choice," Parnell says.

"As we head to the world of cloud computing, what will happen is the organisation will own the network and the users will own the device."

Agnosticism will rule. All you need is a browser.

The exclusion of Apple from the enterprise has its roots in the operating system wars of the 1980s and 1990s, when Apple and Microsoft weren't speaking to each other, as organisations or on a software level.

"Since Mac OS X was introduced Apple has worked tirelessly on the integration side, so Mac is not a second-class citizen," he says.

"We still have to work to overcome the fact many of the guys in IT departments remember the 90s and think nothing has changed."

Apple's X-Server is available to help organisations manage a mixed Mac-PC environment. Its Apple Open Directory talks to Microsoft's Active Directory seamlessly.

Parnell says because Apple doesn't charge licence fees for each connected client, the X-Server can be far more economic for small and medium businesses. There is also now a Mac Mini server, which can be idea for small businesses.

Parnell says as Renaissance rolls out Macs into some of New Zealand's larger organisations, it's confirming the total cost of ownership story uncovered by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance.

"When you have large organisations that outsource their support, they may be charged per incident.

"We're hearing that whereas they may be having two calls a day to support a Windows machine, there may be as few as two in six months on a Mac."

Peter Macaulay, the end user practice principal at research firm IDC, says the Linux desktop has dropped as a priority for corporate IT shops, but the pressure is on them to deliver Apple as a desktop or notebook alternative.

"The solution is the CIO doesn't have to make the decision," he says.

In fact the decision is being taken away from them as staff bring their devices in to work.

John Holley, the chief information officer for the Auckland Regional Council, runs a mixed Mac-PC environment.

He says a lot of senior managers have iPhones, and there are also staff who use Macs, in one case because of its built in support for those with vision problems.

"I've got an X-Server which works as a media server, a wiki server and an integration server. It's a no-brainer - for $10,000, everything just works out of the box.

"A lot of staff don't know they are working on Apple when they put stuff on the web.

"It just comes down to using what is best for the job."