A New Day for Macs in the Enterprise?
Apple iPhone-loving workers who've grown disenchanted with corporate IT might love to ditch their PCs for Macs. But are we really on the cusp of greater enterprise adoption of Apple? Hurdles remain.
Perhaps serendipitously, right around this time, her boss, President and CEO Jay Jaffe, was on vacation with his daughter in San Francisco and visited Apple's flagship store on Stockton Street. "He bought an iPod touch that he was infatuated with," says Magosky. "When he was there, he talked to the business team. They convinced him there was nothing we needed to do now that we couldn't do with them [Apple]."
Before long, Magosky set about switching her entire shop over to Macs, and Apple-friendly software. Since Jaffe Associates serves the legal industry, which makes wide use of Microsoft software, Jaffe began using Office 2008 for Macs. The company chose Kerio MailServer for e-mail , Entourage for archiving and Apple's Xserve server for back-end storage of data. Magosky predicts that Jaffe will realize a savings of 50 percent in maintenance costs due to the Apple switch, which will pay for the hardware and implementation of Apple products in the first year, she says.
While she pays the same hourly rate for Mac support now as she did for Windows, she realized this savings by cutting the amount of hours substantially. The Macs, in other words, required less upkeep.
"It's going to increase the efficiency of our staff tremendously," she says. "On top of the hard dollar savings, it's going to free me up to do other, more value-added things." What about those cool iPhones? While Jaffe's users primarily use RIM BlackBerry devices for mobile needs, Magosky says that she might consider iPhones down the road, if enough users call for them.
Hurdles Remain
Ditching PCs at a 25-person company is one thing. But introducing Apple to a large enterprise with legacy systems is quite another. Even some enterprises who've been managing mixed Mac and PC environments for years say that Apple still has some work to do.
Rob Israel, manager of desktop support at Digitas, a New York–based ad agency, says that 30 percent of his company runs Macs. Israel, who manages some 600 Macs across the enterprise, says that a hybrid environment of Macs and Windows can have its pitfalls, technologically and culturally.
"We barely deploy Apple servers here even though the culture has become Macintosh friendly," he says. "There is still a sense in the IT department that we are a Windows shop, and why bother complicating things by introducing more platforms."
The IT shop runs four Apple Xserves, one of which is used to host Filemaker Pro.
