08/26/2008, 4:30pm, EDT
Tuesday, August 26th
Apple enterprise share nearly quadruples
Apple has managed to almost quadruple its share of the corporate OS market within a short space of time, says Ben Gray of Forrester Research. The analyst notes that while in January 2007, just 1.2 percent of operating systems recorded in an online client survey were Mac OS X, current figures suggest an adoption rate of 4.5 percent. The figure is more remarkable, says Gray, because Apple does not generally market to the enterprise world and offers little software for it.
Gains in the corporate world are instead attributed to two factors, beginning with virtualization. Using software from VMware and Parallels allows companies to have machines running both Windows and Mac OS X, in case an alternate OS becomes favored or necessary. More recent advancements have given companies the ability to run multiple instances of Leopard Server on a single Mac.
Corporate IT divisions are also, however, said to be increasingly accepting of different hardware and software platforms, on the assumption that people are more productive when using whatever platform they are most comfortable with.
Gray adds that Apple gains may be hurting Microsoft, as the former company's share grew 0.9 percent between October 2007 and June 2008, while use of Windows dropped 0.7 percent. Apple is expected to make yet more gains throughout the next 18 months, particularly due to an anticipated burst of hardware and software migrations.
Filed under: Investor, industry, enterprise, Apple
Other story tags: Microsoft, Windows, virtualization, Parallels, vmware, Leopard Server
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linux
what are the linux numbers.. they must be going up. for so many small biz style things linux just spanks everyone b/c its free.
What does that mean?
It went from 10 computers in the enterprise to 40? With all these extra computers in the enterprise, how come the stock keeps going down? The more computers and iPhones that get sold, the lower the stock price goes. Hmmm. Bizarro Apple.
Anonymous
I am a little weirded out by MacNN's decision to use the Anonymous suit logo to represent this story. I could not actually focus on the story because of it...
%
It went from 1.2% to 4.5% - if 10 computers represents 1% of all computers used in Enterprise that means in total 1000 computers are in use. Jeez Odo maybe think before you post stupid comments.Also, the stock seems to keep going up from what I have seen.
Value in software
I think it's the overall value you get back from the software. Especially when you consider all that OSX Server can do for just $999. Compare that to what Windows Server can do for that price and you get much more return on your investment. Plus, it's just easier to deal with.
Re: value
But I haven't heard great things of leopard server. The experiences I've read show it to be much more problematic than Tiger Server.
Redmond Report
The lastest edition of the Redmond Report corroborates this. The MS tech bulletin reports that 75% of all enterprises uses hyper-V virtualization and that 23% of all enterprises are doing their hyper-V using Macs. Check it out.