There has been much talk recently about Apple’s making inroads into the corporate marketplace, with some blogs and journals seeing the company’s recent successes in the consumer sphere as providing impetus to the Macs adoption in companies instead of the machines from the Wintel duopoly. Indeed there have been several high profile leaks (notably two from IBM and Peoplesoft) regarding research projects into widespread Mac adoption within large corporate companies.
As a Mac specialist at a large corporate company with 700 Macs and about 5000 PCs, I am probably better placed than most to comment as I see the day to day demands that such an environment puts on it’s computer estate and the things that we as Mac integrators have to do to go some way toward meeting those requirements on the Mac platform.
Apple have made some changes in the last few years that make the Mac a more realistic proposition for IT departments for example the adoption of (more or less) standard hardware and the provision of integration into some of the systems that larger IT departments use.
I’d like to explore here some of the things that Apple do well and some not so well. Incidentally, I may add to this posting as more things occur to me.
What Apple does that fits with corporate IT:
Our favourite fruit company does do some stuff that is cool with the IT crowd.
Licensing: Apple’s software licensing means that in comparison to Microsoft alternatives their machines now cost the same or are cheaper in the corporate space (regardless of how little that HP box costs) – MS nickel and dime the corporates out of millions in software licenses, every workstation HAS to have at least 3 licenses just to boot before they load any Application software.
All the things a corporate PC needs to work Windows, AD, Server access, Mail, Office, etc. needs a seperate payment. It is so complicated that the MS license guide is over an inch thick. People get employed just to manage the MS licenses.
When you buy an Apple server or OS X unlimited server license, you are covered for an unlimited number of Macs or users (rather, as many as it will cope with anyway) and that’s it. Buy AMP agreements (a little less than the cost of the original license) and you are good for three years of upgrades too.
Management: The Mac platform has a number management technologies that are applicable to our environment, it’s just that they are just less well known.
Apple provide something called Apple Remote Desktop (ARD), which was originally designed for education and gives auditing, screen control and remote deployment. The client software is included with all Mac OS X installations and the Admin software is relatively inexpensive.
Apple’s OpenDirectory provides workstations with a managed environment which although isn’t as sophisticated as AD, works reliably (I have 700 Macs in a corporate environment running it and it is up 24/7/364 – we close 1 day a year for maintenance). Open Directory is basically OpenLDAP with some fancy XML based schema, ARD is a nice way of doing ARD, but which also allows machine auditing and remote software installation.
Included with all Mac workstations is OpenDirectory’s AD plug-in which gives the Mac the ability to bind to an AD domain and benefit from some of the features such as Home Directory management (requires a M$ licence)
Lastly there’s quite a bit of development in third party managment applications such as FileWave, Asset Trustee, LANDesk.
System V: If you are supporting OS X, command line can be very useful. If you are an old school Unix op and are more used to Solaris then Leopard’s adoption of standard System V commands instead of 10.4 and earliers BSD based shell is a great boon.
What they don’t do so well:
Where do I start, OK -
Roadmaps: Apple need to start understanding the mindset of the enterprise customer, which is to say they plan – years in advance.
Apple currently refuse to present road-maps, the iPhone’s recent presentation a notable exception, because they fear that a) their precious new technology will be copied by Redmond or others and brought to market before they manage it and b) because they fear they will not release the software on time or with the feature set they have defined in the press release with the associated lynching that would ensue in the trade press and drop in share price that follows it. With the circus that envelops each and every Apple release, you can’t blame them for being cagey however that doesn’t help the average IT manager when they need to plan the next years budget.
Vendor choice: When there are alternative suppliers the IT buyer trade one off against another to get the best price, this happens with PC suppliers like Dell, HP, IBM etc all the time however this is difficult or impossible to do when Apple are the only player leading to corporate buyers (who know nothing of the benefits a Mac affords) to worry they are getting ripped
Apple, lets face it, have supply issues sometimes – how many times have we seen new popular products released from Apple and them not have stock available? Almost every year. This also makes IT buyers nervous. With Wintel, if stock isn’t available from their normal supplier, it is relatively trivial to buy from somewhere else.
Hardware Choice: Apple make a big deal over their product matrices, however by keeping their product lines restricted to one pro and one consumer in each catagory they are failing to offer the flexibility that the enterprise market needs. The demise of the 12″ laptop is a prime example of this.
Allied to lack of hardware choice is Apple’s prerogative of “driving the marketplace”. Take for example the woefully under specified Mac Book Air. There may come a time when all you need is Wireless comms and a USB port but at the moment that just will not wash with the conservitive spec loving IT crowd. Even Apple’s current range of Pro machines are ‘port lacking’ because they don’t have IRDA or PCMCIA.
Weight: Looking at the Apple software product range, it is all aimed at the consumer or creative pro. A quick glance at Microsoft’s product list includes some pretty heavyweight software, from Office through their wide range of server products and finally dedicated business software under the general title of Microsoft Dynamics. It isn’t all great software, but it is there and it is supported with good first and third party documentation and training.
Training and certification: It’s only since Mac OS X that Apple certification has been available to the public – previously only Apple dealership staff and employees of special “self service organisations” were allowed to be certified as Apple engineers.
Mac OS X brought a new certification program in the form of three stages of technical training, basic help desk (ACHDS), technician (ACTC) and administrator (ACSA), but they are not that well known and staff with them are still quite difficult to find, especially ACSA.
Apple don’t seem to place much importance in these certifications. There is always an enormous delay in making the training available after the software has been released, especially the server products. Even now for example the ACSA courses for 10.5 are still not available many months after release.