"We started seeing each other at tradeshows, we started talking individually and... we felt that doing it as a whole would be far more powerful than doing it individually," said co-founder Peter Frankl.

Formed just a few months ago, the consortium, Enterprise Desktop Alliance (EDA), includes LANrev, Group Logic, Centrify, Atempo, and Parallels. It seeks to combat perceptions that an enterprise-wide deployment of Mac machines would be more trouble than it's worth. "There's this great misperception out there that Macs are difficult to use and manage in Windows environments. And it's simply not true," said Frankl, who is also the founder and chief operating officer at LANrev.

The EDA members want to fill the vacuum around information on Mac deployments available to enterprise IT managers, and help them realize that both platforms, Apple and Windows, can be managed within the same infrastructure.

In fact, the key requirements of enterprise IT—for instance, authentication, management, Active Directory integration, and backup—are already met with tools that exist for Mac machines, and "gives what IT needs, but not everybody knows that," said Reid Lewis, EDA co-founder and CEO at Group Logic.

Driven away by ennui

It may have been the case that enterprise Mac deployments were tricky due to the lack of Windows-compatible applications and enterprise-specific tools that enable network manageability, said Richard Shim, research manager with IDC's personal computing group.

"But that's gradually changing with third-party companies building more applications for the Mac, and those [companies] that allow the Mac to be able to live in the Windows world," said Shim, referring to vendors like those comprising the EDA.

But what's changed accordingly is the market share that Macs hold in the enterprise, rising to eight per cent from approximately four, according to Vince Londini, research analyst with London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Group Ltd.

There are several drivers pushing the growth. For one, said Londini, there's "an ennui with Microsoft" given the lengthy position of dominance the software mogul has held. "Apple has been successful at capitalizing on that by pitching itself as the bright, cheery, usable alternative."

And the release of the Vista operating system that Londini described as "not stunningly, startlingly better" than its predecessor is yet another driver. He doesn't think Vista is necessarily bad but at the end of the day, users question whether the upgrade was worth the time and money.

And, while interoperability of the Mac platform used to be a thorn in the side of many an IT manager who would merely tolerate Macs for the creative types, Londini said that's now different since Apple moved from the Motorola chipset to the Intel platform. "They really narrowed the gap. They can ride on some of the success that the Linux and open source world has been having in the server room because Mac OS X is largely a BSD variant which is from the Linux family," he said. However Microsoft, he added, is also making strides towards better interoperability.

The falling price of the Mac, too, has served to push enterprise adoption as Intel chipsets now allow for commodities of scale. However, Londini cautioned that price and quality can be subjective. The relatively higher acquisition cost of Mac hardware could be justified because, he said, Apple doesn't offer a "B grade product; you couldn't just go out and buy the $200 piece of crud version of hardware and watch your operating system just slog along on it."

Phil Smith, commercial desktop product manager with Hewlett-Packard Co., said that while there are "small gains" by Apple in smaller businesses, he hasn't observed the same for the medium and enterprise level.

Macs work well for small businesses because of their tendency to act more like a consumer, said Smith, and "get tied up in the flashiness and excitement of consumer-type applications that might come with the [machine]. And Apple has a lot of that more personal entertainment-type of an interface." Enterprises, on the other hand, he said, have no need for consumer-based applications or designs "so there is much less of an interest there."