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.
While Israel describes the company's relationship with Apple in terms of contracts as "great," the arrangement leaves some things to be desired, he says. "Apple does not provide technology roadmaps, which enterprise IT departments obviously need," he says. "What's worse, they make their hardware incompatible with the previous version of the operating system, and their schedule is impossible to keep up with."
For instance, Israel says Digitas can't deploy new versions of Leopard, Mac's operating system, as quickly as Apple demands. Every time Apple moves to the next version of an OS, Israel says, Digitas ends up having six months where they're forced to buy out-of-date equipment to stay compatible with the old OS. "We have complained about this for the last four years," he explains. "They [Apple] do not have any motivation to design their new hardware to support an old OS, so they won't."
Not Quite a Tipping Point
Apple's buzz could hardly be louder. But have we now reached a time when many large enterprises can consider doing a rip and replace, swapping PCs for Macs? Not likely, says Kay.
Even if a progressive CIO, who felt his or her company had sunk too much money into Windows, wanted to switch wholesale, gaining the initial capital to get the job done, especially as the economy tightens, it could be difficult, he says. "It's hard to see a time when you can change the paradigm that much for computing," Kay says.
For now, the iPhone might just be the starting point, where businesses dip their toes in the Apple pool to see if the enterprise experience improves.
At New York Media (publishers of New York magazine and NYMag.com), Albert C. Lee, director of IT, says he has used Macs for some employees in the organization but has run into problems with service-level agreements. But that's not going to stop him from potentially adding iPhones to the enterprise when it the capability to access e-mail from a Microsoft Exchange server becomes possible in June.
"A good majority of our enterprise users already have an iPhone for a personal communications device," he says. "The idea of empowering a large population of your corporate users with enterprise push e-mail and remote calendar management, especially when they had none before, is pretty attractive."
