02/28/2007, 6:45pm, EST
Wednesday, February 28th
Mac finally a 'realistic alternative' in IT?
Ignored for years, Apple is--at last--garnering the attention of business IT departments, says Network World's John Fontana. In his latest column, Fontana argues that the Mac now has many key features that were previously missing, such as infrastructure and interoperability hooks, clustering and storage technology, and third-party virtualization software. Significantly, the rise of Intel Macs and Microsoft's switch to Windows Vista has forced some departments to do comparison shopping.
"Intel Macs have really changed things," says Scott Melendez, San Francisco's manager of enterprise messaging. The city first adopted the Mac platform in 2003. "Beyond the obvious comparisons — that Macs are now speed-parity with Wintel machines — vendors have been able to develop more software for the platform, and where that is impossible, virtual machines are always an option."
Tom Gonzales, a network administrator for the Colorado State Employees Credit Union, comments on the issue of Vista. "The changes in Vista are significant enough that we think we can absorb the change going to Macs just as easily as going to Vista," he says. The Credit Union has not yet made its decision. "If you had asked me two years ago to consider Macs, I would have laughed. But Boot Camp and Parallels, anything we can’t do with our Macs we would be able to run a Windows environment under there."
According to some however, there are still problems with making the leap to Apple. The company has no formal support for enterprises, either in technical assistance, or simply in selling products to corporate clients. "To be successful with businesses, they would have to build up an enterprise selling organization if they wanted to gain greater growth in corporate environments," says Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin. There is also the problem of having to use virtualization rather than wanting it, as there continues to be more PC IT software than for the Mac.
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If you've got a office full of G5 towers, for example, you just have to wait for the power supplies to fail, send it in, and hope it gets back quickly.
they do offer parts kits for xServes (or at least they did last year) so youre not waiting around for a server to be fixed.
I loathe this arguemeent because it is just stupid.
Apple makes money from hardware! this is a FACT! licensing OS X to someone else will sink hardware sales which will affect the bottom line (as well as losing control on the hardware/software connection)
Do you seriously think giving up the hardware/software control and losing money is a good business strategy?
A majority of my users are in remote locations, different parts of the country or they are on the road more than they are in the office. Spare machines are worthless for them if they are not in a position to get one. By the time I ship a spare machine to them, the warranty service that Dell offers would have taken care of their issue. Our company can't wait a week or more for something as simple as a power supply so going with Apple would not work.
As much as I dislike Dell, I can't see switching our company to Apple without some kind of guarantee that my downtime would be at a minimum. Apple's enterprise support has a long way to go and my company doesn't have the time or patience for downtime of a week or more.