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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Furthermore, with the exception of Systems Support and a few others, there are comparatively few Mac support companies and mainstream outsourcers have little to do with Macs. “From our perspective, we don't see Macs in any great numbers,” says Mike Lucas, technology manager at performance management software company Compuware. “I spoke to one CIO recently who had a PowerBook. He liked the look of it and had bought it for his personal use, but he said he didn't feel any real need or drive to look at Macs for enterprise work.”
System Support's Razzell says that while business users may be open to Macs, IT departments typically are not. “From an IT department point of view, the easiest thing for them would be to have every single machine identical - all an identical age, built an identical way, by identical manufacturers. It's not surprising that IT departments are the biggest constraints on Apple's growth: it's not the users or the managers of the business, it is most often the IT or MIS department that is most resistant to a multi-platform situation because they regard it as more complicated.”
To combat this, Apple is running 'Switcher' ads in the US, in which various former Windows users extol the virtues of Macs. Several of these are small business owners who “just need their machines to keep working” or who want to be able to look after the machines themselves without having to call in outside help. Apple believes it has doubled its US consumer market share through these ads since they began a few months ago.
Most of Apple's enterprise marketing efforts are targeted at small and medium-sized businesses - companies that do not have their own IT departments and want to keep their IT expenditure to almost zero if possible.
Apple's Tugwell-Smith says the company is well aware that it has to start from the lower end and work its way up. Xserve, he says, is for companies that want Unix but who cannot afford the skills necessary to maintain a Linux server. “Let's make it clear. We have a 1U fibre-channel device. You can't run an entire enterprise on this. We are pitching this at the part of the marketplace where the 1Us play.”
Despite its renewed enterprise push, few IT decision-makers seem prepared to take the risk of betting their infrastructure on Apple. But, says Apple product marketing manager, Phil Schiller, even if the company can increase its share by as little as 1%, that would still be a 33% increase in its slice of the market. “Microsoft won't miss 1% here or there. We don't have to take on the world,” he says.
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