Is Apple About to Have an Enterprise Moment?

Ars Technica reports: Apple and the enterprise--two words that have historically gone together like peanut butter and cheese curds. For much of its history, the computer-cum-iPhone maker has been on the outside of enterprise computing looking in. In fact, it's debatable how much Apple was even looking in. The company has shown little interest in doing what is necessary to woo corporate IT departments and make its case to CIOs.

When I visited the topic of Apple and the enterprise a bit over five years ago, I concluded that Apple had a long, long way to go in order to get its foot in the door. At the time, Mac OS X was still relatively immature, a lot of business software wasn't yet running native on Apple's newest OS, and its machines stood out like sore thumbs among the x86 beige boxes with their PowerPC processors. But nowadays, my, how things have changed.

Apple now has Intel Inside. A larger number of business-oriented apps like Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes now run on Mac OS X, and the increasing number of web applications make the operating system an afterthought for many users. The iPhone is not only the sexiest smartphone around, it's one of the most popular. Most importantly, Macs can do Windows, either through Boot Camp or virtualization. So times have definitely changed, but have they changed enough to get Apple anything more than a toehold into the enterprise?

Some new data from the Information Technology Intelligence Corp. shows that all of these factors have had an impact on Apple's enterprise uptake. ITIC surveyed 700 IT managers and executives and discovered that 80 percent of the respondents had Macs in their corporate environment. Half of those taking the survey said they were ramping up their iPhone integration over and against the popular BlackBerry. And around 30 percent of them are running Windows on their Macs via virtualization products such as VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop.

Still, a stroll through your average cubicle farm turns up little other than Dells, HPs, and other commodity boxes. Is that going to change anytime soon? Not in a meaningful way. There are definitely some opportunities present, but Apple still seems disinclined to follow up on them.

Forces working in Apple's favor
There are three Important trends right now that are giving Apple a foot in the enterprise door: the consumerization of IT, Microsoft's botched Vista launch, and the increasing popularity and visibility of Apple products, especially the iPhone.

In October, Citrix decided to give its employees a $2,100 stipend so that they could purchase a laptop of their choice to use for business and home. Other companies are taking similar steps, and with Apple's US market share growing steadily, consumers who have become accustomed to having a Mac at home are now getting the chance to bring them to work. Mac OS X plays nicely in mixed environments, and the vast majority of Windows-running mission-critical apps can easily be accommodated via virtualization solutions.

If IT consumerization takes off as some expect, it's going to open the door even wider for Apple. Still, it's not going to open the floodgates.

Another opportunity for Apple is the troubled Vista launch. Let's be fair: Vista offers some tremendous improvements over XP that should have IT types excited, especially in the area of security. But the way Microsoft mismanaged the launch, and the steeper hardware requirements, have IT departments around the world sitting on the known quantity that is Windows XP and waiting to see what Windows 7 will bring. In the past month, I've talked to executives at a handful of Fortune 500 companies and a senior administrator at a prestigious management consulting firm, and it's unanimous: they have no plans to deploy Vista. One company I contacted is even reevaluating its entire computing platform strategy, keeping an open mind about migrating away from Windows altogether.

That's an opening for Apple. Although Windows 7 will have the same hardware requirements as Vista, they're still steeper than those of XP. For some companies, a Vista rollout will mean new hardware purchases... so why not make those purchases Macs?

Working against Apple--just as it has for the past couple of decades--is the cost of its hardware. Cupertino likes its high margins, but corporate IT departments don't. $2,500 workstations and $2,200 laptops are overkill for most corporate use. Apple's least-expensive machines are the MacBook and Mac mini, but there are cheaper Windows alternatives available. And if companies are still going to need to run some Windows-specific applications, the cost of additional Windows licenses may need to be factored in.

The iPhone 3G offers support for Exchange, push e-mail, VPNs, and remote wipe. Those features make what was just a really cool consumer-focused gizmo an object of lust for many in the business sector. And the foot-in-the-door theory holds that more iPhones in the workplace is a good thing for Mac adoption.

There are still some things that Apple needs to fix before the iPhone takes the enterprise by storm, however. At the top of the list are the problems with Exchange still left over from the iPhone 3G's launch. Those will need to be tidied up before the iPhone--and Apple--can become enterprise monsters.

Apple definitely has an opportunity in the enterprise right now like it has never had before, at least when it comes to the stability of its platform and its underlying architecture, and the missteps of its biggest competitors. But we're also in a recession right now, and businesses are going to be stretching non-mission-critical hardware upgrade cycles indefinitely. Those that do are going to find Apple hardware prices hard to swallow as well.

But the biggest obstacle to Apple seeing any serious growth in the enterprise is the company's apparent lack of interest. Although Apple has devoted substantial resources to the education sector and has a well-thought-out strategy for it, it has never put the same effort toward the enterprise. There's no indication that Apple has any plans to change that--and that's going to be a turnoff for many companies.

And why should Apple change? Apple's strategy has been to make irresistible, shiny objects for consumers, and shoppers have happily obliged, snapping up MacBooks, iPods, and iPhones. What they're doing is working great, as the Mac maker is seeing quarter after quarter of growth.

In the end, the question of Apple and the enterprise comes down to this: if Apple wanted to attack the enterprise, it has the bankroll to develop and hire the expertise to do so. But given that its consumer efforts are going so well, why bother?

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