Are We Seeing a More Enterprise Apple (For Real This Time)?

When it was announced that enterprise applications could be developed for the iPhone, it left me to ponder the question that’s been asked many times over the years: will Apple really turn a corner and become more business-friendly?

Anecdotally, I think we’re heading in that direction. Specifically, three things have convinced me of this:

I spoke with a COO last week of a small consulting firm who told me that she was switching her entire user-base from a Windows (PC) environment to Macs for better collaboration, fewer bugs, and lower maintenance costs. She also said she’d consider iPhone deployments if users wanted them.

Second, from Apple’s end, its Mac pro and X-Serve upgrades in January were viewed as important to businesses, though as the linked text informs you, it was bound to be overshadowed by the Macbook Air announcement a week later.

Lastly, in our coverage of the consumerization of IT, we see users calling upon their CIOs to let them use technologies that they’ve had at home or even grown up with. Macs, from both a hardware and software perspective, have been prevalent on college campuses for quite some time. As these people hit the workforce (and, actually, they already have), CIOs will have to explain the value on an all-PC environment with greater specificity than “Macs are not for business.” Some forward-thinking CIOs, like Douglas Merrill of Google for instance, let users pick whether they want a Mac or PC.

I’m by no means an Mac guru (I use Windows at work and Linux, the Ubuntu distribution, at home), but I’d be curious to know from any enterprise IT departments if they’ve considered moving over to Mac recently, and for what reasons.

Feel free to e-mail me as I’m pursuing a couple stories around this topic. Or, as always, sound off below.