Crunch point
- Article 63 of 77
- Information Age, June 2003
Apple wants to take on the enterprise, but its target audience will take a lot of convincing.
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Apple is fighting back using the same standards argument. “We've moved Apple away from proprietary technology towards open standards,” claims Gary Tugwell-Smith, product marketing manager for the Xserve line. “We play well with Windows. We play well with Linux. We play well in the data centre.”
Indeed, rather than trying to reclaim market share by trying to fight Microsoft by itself, Apple is using the standards argument to join forces with all of Microsoft's competitors and even some of its allies. Analyst company Gartner Group predicts that Microsoft may lose as much as 5% market share to alternative operating systems by 2007. The source of much of that loss is Linux - something that could benefit Apple in the long term.
Apple is also trying to fight Microsoft's dominance using other open source products. 'Rendezvous', for example, is its implementation of the Zeroconf standard, a way for network devices and services to automatically locate each other and discover each other's capabilities without intermediate servers or manual configuration.
While Zeroconf has been a public standard for several years, no vendor had actually done anything with it until Apple integrated it into its operating system and hardware. Apple opened the source of its implementation immediately, so other companies have been able to include it licence-free in their own products.
Business benefits
But whether Apple has a credible alternative technology to Microsoft or not is, for most enterprises, almost incidental. For businesses to even consider using a Macintosh over a lower-specification but considerably cheaper Windows PC, it needs to derive real business benefits from the switch.
Jeanne Razzell, commercial director of Systems Support, which supplies consultancy and support services to companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, argues that there are total cost of ownership (TCO) reasons for using Macs.
“They're easier to use and easier to fix,” she says. “They go wrong less often in a serious way. I can send a support person out and if a Macintosh needs an application reinstalled, it takes 15-45 minutes for them to arrive and sort the problem out. On a PC, it can take a day.”
Gartner research backs this up. The higher the percentage of Macs in an organisation, it argues, the lower the tech support costs. In fact, PC support costs are four times higher than the equivalent costs for Mac, the company says.
When it comes to automation and systems management, however, the case is not so clear-cut. “Apple's systems do not use any of the large scale automated tool sets,” says Rob Enderle, an analyst at Forrester. “They won't use [IBM's] Tivoli, they don't work underneath [HP's] OpenView yet. Even the third-party tool sets won't work under the Apple platform so you can't administer them in large volume.”
In a world that seems to be rapidly deploying large-scale, highly automated software management, argues Enderle, Apple will continue to be locked out because it has no interoperability with evolving systems management tools.
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