Mac use finds growing favor in mixed enterprises
updated 03:40 pm EST, Tue February 23, 2010
Worker preference, tech support cited as reasons
About 66 percent of IT administrators from organizations mixing Macs and PCs expect their Mac populations to grow, claims a firm specializing in ways of streamlining Mac integration. The Enterprise Desktop Alliance notes that the figure is based on data from 322 administrators, each of which is from a company with over 50 servers or 100 Macs. Over 500 people in total responded to the survey.
Popularly chosen reasons for adding Macs are said to include worker preference, better productivity and easier tech support. A Gartner researcher comments that adoption is also helped by an increasing number of platform-independent enterprise apps, making it less and less important important which hardware an organization relies on. Nevertheless, while 60 percent of those surveyed said their organizations provide support for both Macs and PCs, 14 percent say the Mac users are left to handle their own troubleshooting.
The most critical issues for those surveyed were filesharing between operating systems, and security, each picked by as important by 79 percent. Client management ranked at 72 percent, and Active Directory integration slotted in at 66 percent. Cross-platform help desk and knowledge base support was essential to just 60 percent of the group.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Jul 2006
Definitely see it here at work.
We're not a big firm (~150 employees). But what once was a PC-only company only five years ago has morphed into a Linux/Mac/Wintel company. And all the software developers (except for the handful that request otherwise) have at least a Macbook Pro to work with, to go with the rest of their desktop setup. Managers and senior developers get Mac Pros and two 30" Cinema Displays. Desktop life must be pretty good for those guys.