Is your company ready for the Apple Invasion?

[Niheel]

The Apple invasion into corporate has started and I can't say if I am excited or scared. As an IT manager, I have nightmares over all the support and technical issues of integrating Apple hardware and software into our company. As an owner of ample Apple products, I'm excited about being able to use my iPhone and MacBooks at the company.

For years many of us have fought to get Apple products into our company's infrastructure. Much to our dismay, the cost involved with supporting Apple products across the whole enterprise always outweighed the benefit. It didn't help that even Steve Jobs for many years held a firm stance on being a consumer oriented company.

Things are changing. There is a whole new level of curiosity and excitement about getting Apple stamped devices ready to work with our corporate IT. There are more and more employees demanding access for their Apple hardware. Even the bosses from the top are more open. They are curious and in some cases even ready to make the changes. I'm sure their experience with other Apple products had nothing to do with it. ;-)

Take a look at these excerpts from corporate executives and CEO's in the latest Business Week magazine article "The Mac in the Gray Flannel":

• • Anthony Decanti, Vice-president for technology Werner Enterprises ($2B in sales)
    • Werner Enterprises (WERN), a trucking company based in Omaha with $2 billion in sales, decided to start letting employees use a variety of computers a few years ago. When they began to choose Macs, the company reached out to Apple. "They all but told us to take a hike," says Anthony Decanti, vice-president for technology. But Decanti persisted, and Apple eventually sent an account rep.
  • Michele Goins, Chief Information Officer at Juniper Networks
    
    • "If we opened it up today, I think 25% of our employees would choose Macs," she says.
  • Scott Kriens, CEO At Sunnyvale (Calif.)-based Juniper
    
    • One of the people with a new Mac Book laptop. "Everybody told me I should get one," he says. "It's not anything to do with negative perceptions about Microsoft. It's just that Macs are cool."
  • Mark Slaga, Chief Information Officer of Dimension Data
    
    • A large computer services firm based in suburban Johannesburg, says he has received 25 e-mails recently from employees who want permission to use Macs at work.

In a survey of 250 diverse companies that has yet to be released, the market research firm Yankee Group found that 87% now have at least some Apple computers in their offices, up from 48% two years ago.

Companies are stepping up for their employees and starting to support Apple in the business environment. Notable ones include:

• IBM
• Cisco
• Google

Many CEO's and Leaders are already using some sort of Apple product for their professional life.

• Dayton, Sky; CEO EarthLink Network
• Eisner, Michael; CEO Disney Corp.
• Gore, Al; U.S. ex Vice-President
• Hawk, Tony; skateboarder
• Jobs, Steve; co-founder Apple Computer
• Lerner, Sandy; founder of Cisco Systems, Urban Decay
• Lowe, Bill; former IBM bigwig
• MacCready, Paul; inventor
• Lucas, George; director/producer
• Rao, P.V. Narashima; ex Prime Minister of India
• Sheetrit, Meir; Minister of Justice, Israel
• Jay-Z (Yes, HP paid me. But I use an Apple.)
• Tigret, Isacc; founder - Hard Rock Café
• Yeltsin, Boris; ex Soviet president
• Larry Ellison, Chairman, CEO and Founder Oracle Corp.
• Roy Disney, Disney Board of Directors

There are also legions of celebrity endorsers and media darlings that support and promote the Apple Invasion to consumers (our corporate employee base in most cases).

Another factor that could drive increased usage in coming years is the droves of college students who have known nothing but their Apple during their higher education coming into the workplace.

According to a survey of 1,200 undergrads by researcher Student Monitor this year, 43% of college students who intend to buy a laptop plan to buy a Mac, up from 8% in 2003.

Combine this with constant word of mouth marketing from colleagues, friends and family and there is a significant shift in usage patterns in favor of Apple in corporate environments.

All this translates into changes for many of our corporate IT policies . We have to adapt to the demand and to be open to the idea of sharing our corporate networks and resources and even support Apple devices on our own (no in-house Genius Bar).

The best advice given we've heard so far . . . keep an open mind and get ready to be Appleified.

Is your company ready for the Apple Invasion? What kind of resources are you setting up to support the influx of Apple users in your company?

[CyberZeus]

Guys, I have a very important question which relates exactly to this article:

In a couple of days I'll start working at Adobe and I get to choose what kind of laptop I want. Either a MacBook Pro or some kind of Lenovo. I chose the MacBook.

Upon this, I was informed that there is almost no inhouse support for and I have to make sure things like Flex Builder and AIR SDK are running. Pretty much, I have to ensure myself that everything is running.

NOW the QUESTION: If something shouldn't run in OSX, I can just boot into Windows and get it to run there, right? A MacBook booted in Windows (through Bootcamp) behaves EXACTLY like any other PC, right? If something doesn't run there, it shouldn't run anywhere else.

I would tremendously appreciate a quick answer.

DISCLAIMER: None of the product references below should be construed to be an endorsement by Cisco Systems or any of its employees.

I work at Cisco and we have several thousand Mac users all operating under self support. There are a few apps that do not run native under OSX so to address this, the majority of us run VMWare\Parallel s with WinXP. Also, a few folks do run Bootcamp and with VMWare version 2, Bootcamp partitions can be accessed directly by VMWare so net-net, we have many options at our disposal.

Personally, I have over 100% functional parity because I can do whatever I could do before on my Thinkpad PLUS all of the benefits provided on the Mac. So to answer the question directly - I personally have NOT seen any difference between the virtual machine WinXP and the "real" WinXP in terms of behavior. One thing - MAKE SURE you install all of the applicable tools that come with both Fusion and Parallels - this is key.

Next,in regard to the question "Is Apple or are Macs ready for the enterprise?". This is an extremely difficult question to answer because there are so many discrete differences in the enterprise world. In some cases, depending on the functional needs & the desired support model - balanced against cost - the answer will be no; in others, it will be yes. In our environment here at Cisco - which I think most would agree is a pretty large and complex enterprise environment - we can say pretty much yes. It's not perfect - we wish there were more functionality - but if nothing changed right now, I would still, as most folks here do, have over 100% functional parity.

There are probably two macro things that Apple should do to help cement their desired place in the enterprise:

1) An answer to Exchange - either in functionality, compatibility, or replacement products;

2) LDAP, ActiveDirectory , OpenDirectory support - this has been mentioned elsewhere in this post so you all probably get the point.

IMHO, if those two things were addressed, then I think you would see a sharp increase in Mac adoption in a large number of enterprise deployments. Otherwise, we shall see...

[MacDonalds]

What the point of putting in Macs? To reduce support costs its best to keep with one OS and brand of hardware. Why muddy it up with MACs? Graphics isnt even a good selling point for them anymore. There is not anything you cant do with a Intel box and nothing a MAC can do better so its just preference of the users.

http://www.revver.com/video/225121/mac-gamer-switch-parody/

[Markus]

I can dig it.

[drhowarddrfine]

Hmm. When I worked at Silicon Graphics (SGI) around 1990, the whole company ran on Macs networked with IRIX (Unix).

[tikatam]

Thanks for the answers guys!

[Partners in Grime]

Having IT guys with current knowledge and an open mind is a huge asset.

[danp129]

So can 1 IT guy roll out a new image to 200+ mac systems, rename them to their original name and be ready to login to a domain while he patches servers and drinks a few beers?

[tharden3]

I want to be invaded! Where do I sign up?

[NeoPa]

@Partners in Grime
It amuses me that being aware of problems that some others simply fail to appreciate (mainly because they haven't had the experience) is assumed to be closed-mindedness.

Even without my own experience, it's clear that the concept of the Mac's readiness for being incorporated into business environments is not yet at the stage where it could be considered to be straightforward . Some of the posts in here make that quite evident.

Sure, if you ignore some of the issues, you can get it to work with little or no problems, but not everyone has the luxury of ignoring those issues. Until the capabilities in these areas are 100% compatible (without necessarily being restricted in any way - I'm happy to accept that much of what's available on a Mac is superior to the Windows alternatives) there will be problems for IT staff to integrate them into that structure.

Just because some people have no concept of the structure and why it's important, is not a sign of a problem with the IT mindset.

Having said that, of course, I have no argument with the actual statement. Those two attributes are certainly to be looked for in IT staff anywhere.

[Jyoti Ballabh]

well, you would be glad to know that the net worth of companies designing iphone apps is over 16 billion USD in US alone. So, yea APPLE invasion is pretty much in vogue.