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Apple's Macworld Looking To Corporate Users
coondoggie writes to mention a Network World article about a focus on corporate users at the upcoming MacWorld Expo. Along with the consumer announcements (iTV, iPod stuff), there will be several elements dedicated to introducing IT pros to Apple hardware. From the article: "The show has really evolved. For a long time it was a consumer-oriented show and those of us who are from the enterprise space - there weren't very many of us - would use it as a place to meet and compare notes ... Now Macintosh in the enterprise is becoming more recognized and there are tracks that are specifically for us enterprise people. We don't have to sneak off anymore."
to start using Macs and then my company will port our software to Mac. Or is it the other way around, where we port and then our customers can switch to Macs?
Start Running Better Polls
I'm guessing they were referring to the OTHER side of the corporate network (authentication, web serving, database, e-mail, etc) instead of the client boxes. Of course this ignores the argument that Macs are cheaper because of the lack of spyware/viruses/etc which you may or may not buy.
There is no dispute that most custom business apps are written to Windows, although Parallels can fix that (though not cheaply at $80 for Parallels and $75 for an OEM windows).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Unless those apples cost less to keep up / maintain / their software is cheaper / they use less power.
By far the largest cost in IT is man hours. If you drop those by a little, you can save more than an apple will cost you.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Look at all the DRMs it is pushing in iPod. Look at how they stymie interoperability. Look how cavalierly they ignore all my settings and repeatedly install iPodhelper and other junk in the start up tray. Look how aggressively they try to associate Apple executables with every damn file type there is. Make no mistake, Apple is just a Microsoft wannabe that failed miserably to be Microsoft.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Macs also last longer and require less day-to-day maintenance which negates the increased upfront costs.
My last job, I admin'd a network and supported over 100 users at an all-Mac shop, by myself. This was in the late 90s, so it was pre-OS X. Most of my day was spent reading and surfing the web in my office. I dealt with the occasional hardware failure. Once in a while a Mac would get cranky and I'd have to go run Norton Utilities on it to fix it up, which it very seldom failed to do. Most of my support calls were to help people deal with Office documents sent from Windows-based clients/vendors/etc, because this was before the antitrust stuff really kicked into gear and Microsoft was merrily using their ever-changing Office file formats to force upgrades and keep competitors at bay.
Eventually the company decided to migrate to Windows "to be compatible with the rest of the world." Fantastic choice. The IT staff quickly tripled, and we really needed a fourth because of all the shit that went wrong with Windows and the crappy Dells the company settled on. I very quickly got tired of it and left.
Apple has made great strides since then with OS X, and would already be a force to be reckoned with in the enterprise if it weren't for empire-building PHBs who must preserve their big budgets and staff of minions to tend to temperamental Windows boxes.
The vast majority of "business apps", especially custom stuff, don't run on MacOS.
Macs don't have anything to really compare with Active Directory, and especially GPOs.
So...why would a business run on Macs? Unless they are a pre-press or video-production house, of course.
You gotta love the nay sayers that speak authoritatevly about something they have done zero research on. The more expensive macs are more expensive. You can buy a Mac Mini for $599 and it is a much better quality machine than the equivalent pricepoint pc. There is a Mac version or equivalent of the most important "business apps" and most of the "custom stuff" get's rewriten quite often and normaly relies on core technologies (SQL, PHP etc..) that thrive on the Mac platform. Mac's do have something to compare and completely integrate with Active Directory it is called Open Directory Research = good. Hiperbole = weak.
"This message was sent from an Apple
Apple has never got it. Ever. It means Corporate or Enterprise IT. If you look at their history in dealing with Big companies, you see recurring mistakes over the past 15 years. Some examples... In the early '90s, Apple was IN BASF. One of the things BASF liked was Apple seemed to be actively supporting the platform. They chose to over look the lack of engineering tools for the great support Apple was giving them. Then Apple Europe restructed and all the close working relationship was dropped. By '95, Apple was pretty much out of every european production/manufacturing company.
I was working as an Apple developer for 10 years in engineering. Every WWDC I would argue (with the sci-eng evangelist; a position they found hard to staff) that incentives to VARs would not break into corporate IT. Productivity alone doesn't cut it. The world needs Apps, and Apple needed to bend over backward to support developers brave enough to try for that 1%. Suffices to say... the strategy has not changed. Incentives to VARs and pushing the illusory ease and security envelope.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Maybe you can check facts first.
Check Leopard MacOSX Server:
Apache, Samba, OpenLDAP, Kerberos, Postfix, Cyrus, SpamAssasin, Jabber, CUPS, POSIX, Wiki, Xgrid, QT Streaming... all 64-bit, not mentioning DTrace and ZFS
Dude! That makes is coolest server on the block!!
MacOSX 10.5 Leopard Server
That's the big news. I know it's not exactly "news" as in "new," but this is the only thing that will make many Windows shops even seriously consider Macs.
Outlook, web apps that need the Windows version of IE and IT ignorance about OSX were killers for bringing Macs into the enterprise in any large numbers. With Windows on Mac hardware, at least it looks possible.
TW
I was thinking about this exact thing the other day. The office I work in has about 300 people in it and 6 (that I know of) IT staff that do nothing but fix our computers. If you assume that each one costs the company $150K/year you could pay for a new macbook every year (just throw the old one out) for every employee if you could get rid of just 2 of them. I don't know if Macs would make that possible though.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
The thing is, unless Apple can seamlessly integrate their desktop OS into Active Directory like how 2000/XP (and soon Vista) already do, they're not going to be considered as a major player in corporate IT land. They need to be able to plug into currently existing infrastructure, be centrally managed, and offer an improved Net Present Value over PC's.
I just don't see that happening for a number of reasons, asides from having to wait for Samba-4. It's going to be really tough to convince a CFO to buy new $2,000 MacBook Pro's for its users, plus copies of Parallels/VMWare Fusion, plus a Windows OS (not sure if MVL applies to Apple-based hardware - anyone?), and any other number of pieces of software that they need.
With bulk-licensing programs, it's much cheaper to replace old PC hardware with new while not having to worry a whole lot about licensing (so long as you did your homework when you spent the money). That's because you're moving from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, per say. There are very few vendors that'll let you move a license across different OS's.
Also, you have to re-train end users on how to use a different OS with its own quirks, provide HelpDesk support for dual-OS's (unless you ditch windows entirely; good luck with that), and you can't centrally manage them like you can with 2000/XP boxes in a properly implemented Active Directory environment.
Exchange support in Entourage is crap too since it relies on WebDev (IMAP/POP are your other options, which aren't good corporate solutions). Mac Excel != PC Excel. You get the point.
I do see Apple making inroads in the SoHo (Small Office, Home Office) area. Here you don't need a Domain infrastructure, workers are their own help desk, and so long as your work doesn't rely on some PC-only software, you can get by. The problem here is these customers are very price sensitive, so a Dell $500 special is much more appealing than what Apple offers.
On the IT side of things, I use a MacBook Pro with OS X, XP, and Gentoo Linux loaded on it, running in Parallels. It's my main box, and I love it for a few reasons:
1) 3 OS's on one machine instead of 3 OS's on three machines. Wonderful!
2) I personally like OS X as my main desktop environment over XP and Gnome.
3) I need access to all 3 OS's to do my work, which is pretty rare.
On the downside:
1) No docking station support.
2) No Serial/Parallel/Modem cables - all needed by IT Pro's to hook into existing networking gear, and to provide legacy support.
3) The battery sucks relative to previous PC laptops I've had (2-3 hours use vs. 5-6 on a PC laptop).
4) No floppy drive.
Ready for Corporate IT land? It still has a long ways to go. For a power user like myself? Yeah, it fits nicely.
Totally agree here. OSX, FreeBSD, linux, and OpenVMS are for "n00bs".
Everyone know that the real "l33t h4ck3r admiz" chose Windows.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/
$499 for 10 users, $999 for unlimited.
http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/
Very competitive pricing.
I don't have experience in running it in the Enterprise, but it's a very solid choice for running a SME off of - at a far lower cost than Microsoft. We had around 200 users running on OSX and Windows with roaming profiles, centralised user management, 5TB of network shares, network printing all on a couple of Tiger servers.
Yes, the hardware costs are greater - but the software costs are much much lower.
1) A fully working version of Outlook needs to be available on OS X. This means proper support for public folders (email, contacts, and calendars), accessing directory information (GAL), task requests, etc. Outlook Web Access sucks, having to make Mac users use Citrix to access Outlook on Windows sucks, and Entourage is a joke.
2) Proper support of Active Directory integration, without third-party utilities.
3) Support for something similar to Group Policy (or having GP objects for OS X able to get added to an existing Active Directory setup) so we can control user's machines.
We can deal with Office lagging a bit, or not having Access available on the Mac. But these three things, especially #1, are what's keeping Macs from coming into the office both here and at many other places. Given how weakly these items have been implemented over the past few years, I'm not holding my breath for any major improvements in the near future.
Which the grandparent hadn't even bothered to read up on. "It's a Mac it can't do those stuff". Yet OSX Server is a drop in replacement for an NT Domain server without the honerous CAL pricing (It's SAMBA/LDAP/CUPS etc etc with a decent centralised management toolset).
The article discussed mainly enterprise applications like file and print servers. Quietly Apple has been positioning itself in this area with hardware like XServe and XRAID. Software is slowly developing, but remember OS X is Unix based so many Unix applications will require porting and not full re-writes. At least one application, XSan is interesting. The ability to turn any and all your Apple servers into a huge SAN. There is potential. Corporate desktops may come later.
The last time I checked the vast majority of businesses use applications like Office and Quickbooks which are available for OS X. Custom applications will not work, but the vast majority of businesses are small businesses which can't afford custom software.
True, nobody but only MS has Active Directory. For Windows file compatibility, you can run Samba and OS X does support all sorts of other LDAP protocols.
Many small businesses could benefit from the lower TCO of running Macs. Less IT staffing for example. Many of the core business software like Office and Quickbooks is available for OS X. So why not?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The funny thing to me is, the PHB's never calculate the employee downtime into the picture. For example, sure maybe you can save yourself a $40,000 tech if you are running macs and you have less problems, but they don't take into account the $100,000 of lost sales when the sales team can't work because their PC shit itself.
The problem in your argument is the assumption that Apple does not have something that competes in all of those spaces. But Apple has actually had centralized management for much longer than it has been available for Windows, and it is generally an easier-to-administer system. And system imaging is much easier on the Mac side.
m l
Now for the details:
For the AD/GPO side you have MacOS X Server's OpenDirectory and Workgroup Management. The later product stared out in the MacOS 7 days as "Macintosh Manager" and was available as part of AppleShare IP product. You can do an awful lot of locking down on the computer with the point-and-click components, including setting the users to use network home directories (pretty much the same avrients as are available on Windows). A good begining point for this would be Apple's page on MacOS X Server: http://www.apple.com/server/desktop_management.ht
For imaging you have a number of choices: You can make up a computer as you would like it imaged, then use the free imaging tools that are included with the OS (Disk Utility has absorbed this capability, it used to be part of ASR). Then you can either push it back onto the computer using Disk Utility again, or use the image to NetBoot computers from a MacOS X Server (technically you don't need server, but it makes it easier), use the free NetBoot/NetRestore system to allow you to cause network-based imaging to happen, use the free tool Radmind to keep the image in sync (complex settings possible, and you can update one computer then let the rest follow it automatically), or use any of the other techniques that are out there (LANRev, NetOctopus, etc).
Oh... and an image you make of one computer will boot all computers that that OS supports (computers much older, or newer than the OS won't work), there are a few tricks and traps to that, but not many that matter. And there is currently the caveat that you need 2 images: one for PPC and one for Intel.
And on the remote software install party, Apple Remote Desktop does this wonderfully. It even allows for broadcast installing and leaving a package on a server so that disconnected users will get it the next time they connect.
Oh, and then you can also use AD servers to do all of this management if you would like, either through schema modification or adding a MacOS X Server on the side.
The Mac Mini at $599.00 is really a different animal than the ~$500 Box you'd get from dell or the like. And the first Minis (the PPC ones) were woefully underpowered such that it had difficulty running the supplied OS in its standard configuration. I bought one and was very disapointed with it. The new ones may be better, but I'm sure not going to fork out another $599 to find out. Also, they are only a viable option if you already have usb keyboard and mouse plus a monitor. If you need those, you'll end up, price wise, in the Core 2 Duo desktop with 19" flat panel range.
If Apple was serious about this space they'd come out with a ~$1000 expandable box, or even a Mini that you could easily open and upgrade (poping the case open with a pair of putty knives and voiding the warranty isn't a viable option most places). Frankly, Apple equipment is aimed at consumers and high end video/audo workstation users. None of their equipment, IMHO, is appealing to enterprise.
Almost everything you just described can be done with a Mac OS X Server box and Apple Remote Desktop. Macs support Active Directory. They also support remote installation of software, NetBoot and Network Install, and Network Home Directories.
About the only thing on your list that's missing is Exchange/Outlook. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You DO realize that you can do the same under Mac OS X? In fact it's even easier!
NetBoot
Workgroup Manager
These services are extremely simple to set up and manage. In my opinion they are much easier to manage than Ghost and Active Directory or their equivalents on the Windows side of things.
Sapere aude!
Sure it can. But how many places run NT PDCs still, versus W2K, W2K3? "The following functionalities are not provided by Samba-3: ... Acting as a Windows 2000 Domain Controller (i.e., Kerberos and Active Directory). In point of fact, Samba-3 does have some Active Directory Domain Control ability that is at this time purely experimental that is certain to change as it becomes a fully supported feature some time during the Samba-3 (or later) life cycle. However, Active Directory is more then just SMB it's also LDAP, Kerberos, DHCP, and other protocols (with proprietary extensions, of course)."
So really, your answer is just a little disingenuous to suggest that all these companies can rip out their PDC and dump a Samba box as a "drop in replacement".
Odd. I purchased the MPB I'm typing this on under a developer discount. The PowerBook on the coffee table was purchased under a developer discount a couple of years ago. Apple's gotten out of discounting hardware to developers? Strange... they still have a hardware discount program on their web page.
Apple needs to put docking connectors on their laptops before they're going to be taken seriously in the enterprise. I switched from Apple to Dell for this reason alone. (OK, and Dells were $1000 cheaper at the time for the same system. Now that the price gap has closed, I'd be willing to switch back to Apple.)
My other car is first.
You need to reimage computers each time? My god!, is this the dark ages. Get radmind you silly sod. Oh wait, it's mac only.
Hun, I hate to break this to you, but as a Mac admin watching over hundreds of heavily abused workstations, the tools for OSX are far better.
I gloat to our windows admin every day about how much better my tools are.
The article's title is misleading. It refers to "Apple's Macworld", but Apple doesn't hold Macworld, a convention company is responsible for it. Apple and the Steve Job's keynote is a big part of the attraction of the show, but it isn't Apple's show. There is nothing in the article that suggests Apple has a new focus on corporations. There is the MacIT conference, but that appears to be run by the same company that runs Macworld.
Most new application development in the Enterprise market seems to be web based and can work fine with Macintosh clients. This nonsense about "most business apps are Windows-only" is based on the erroneous assumption that just because there are lots of tiny little companies pooping out their custom apps (which nobody else uses) in visual basic that the Macintosh can't play in the Enterprise market. That's definitely wrong in both the server and the client desktop/mobile markets. There is a Macintosh in the Enterprise future.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
You reply to a post about specialized scientific software by talking about the Apple interface guidelines. The fact is that we have a couple of categories of applications, and research oriented software is a separate market, and a first version without a super Mac-centric UI is not an issue. If the Darwine crew ever gets ported to Quartz, then compiling against WineLib would sufficient as a v1.0 port.
Get it on the Mac, get it running, keep rev'ing, with each Rev becoming more Mac friendly.
No, you can't ship an IM client that breaks the UI guidelines, but if you're the only player (or one of three) in the specialized market, then you ship whatever you can and keep rev'ing. Be the first to ship a Mac version, and you'll get more sales... possibly not Mac sales though. If the CEO, CIO, or anyone in a decision making capacity happens to LIKE Macs (runs one at home, whatever), then simply supporting Macs may sell your Windows software... because they hope that when all the pieces are in place, they'll migrate to a Mac network.
People are too short sited and like straw-man arguments to avoid understanding the large chunks of the software market.
No floppy drive... you crack me up.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
For around 30 years UNIX has had a simple security model of "you", "your friends" and "everyone else in the world". Apply that simple model with diligent use of userIDs and groupIDs, add a sprinkling of NIS(+) or even LDAP, throw in some use of "sudo" and you can control just about anything you need to.
Yep, it took me a while to get used to it but compared to the complete and utter confusing mess Microsoft have made of users and policies, it's still a doddle...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I'm sorry, but if it takes 6 IT people to support 300 people/computers, then none of the IT people are worth $150K/year, even with benefits and payroll taxes included in that number.
Not to disagree with your other points, but regarding the Mac Mini, my GF and I had the very first one that came out, the 1.25 GHz G4. The stock 256M of RAM is too little we 'upgraded' to 512M of RAM. It worked great for most stuff, occasionally we'd get the pinwheel of death w/ too many applications going. Did you run with only 256M of RAM? That was a mistake, IMHO, Apple should have started with at least 512M RAM at the first go, although they fixed this with the first revision to the mini.
A few months ago we got the stock version of the latest mini, the dual-core Intel. It is $100 more than the older mini, but comes w/ 512M Ram default, and a faster dual-core processor. Much better performance.
But IMHO for businesses, if they're seriuosly looking at the mini, it's probably worth going just $400 more, at least to the 17" iMac, which gives you the built-in display, dual-core processor, keyboard/mouse, all in a nice small-footprint. At $1000 a pop, it's not a bad desktop solution for most situations. (yeah, yeah, i know you can buy a dell w/ screen for $500, but let's compare apples to apples).
Other than that I totally agree with you, lamenting the lack of a middle option between the iMacs and the $2500 Mac Pro. Ie, it would be nice if Apple had a headless box w/ expandable slots, in the $1000 to $1500 range.
make world, not war
They introduced something new for corporate customers in the UK; a new repair policy that violates their own AppleCare agreement. Now they require you to take defective Macs to an authorised repair centre, rather than having them collected and shipped back to you. Since AppleStores are still very rare in the UK, and there aren't many resellers left since Apple started direct selling over the Internet, this means a drive of at least an hour (each way) for most people to drop it off, and the same later to collect it. For home users this is bad enough, but how many companies can spare a technician for a day for every faulty machine?
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As for docking connectors, is that really a sticking point now that there are wireless (bluetooth) keyboards and mice available?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Fairly? That's one way to look at it I guess. Another way is that the majority of business users will be served just fine by a $500 PC, and that apple's only offering in that price range is expensive and comparatively difficult to expand. In business, it simply doesn't matter that your computer looks sexier than the next guy.
Or put another way, pretty much any business whose needs are suited by OSX... they'd also be suited by Linux, which would be even cheaper. So why use MacOS, which ties you to specific hardware? It's not like there's anything special about Apple hardware any more.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think OS X might also be lacking somewhat on the enterprise management side. Despite using LDAP for OpenDirectory, it is still more like NT domains. For example, Workgroup Manager just displays a flat list of users/groups. It doesn't take advantage of the hierarchal nature of LDAP. And AFAIK you can to fancy things like partitioning your tree or doing that forest/tree thing that ActiveDirectory does (I'm an old Novel NDS/eDirectory guy, I'm not too familiar with the details of ActiveDirectory) You also have less control over users. I'd hate to deploy OpenDirectory in a very large org. OS X is still workgroup/education class, IMO. Hopefully Apple is adding more Enterprisey management features to Leopard.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Yes. Because there aren't wireless monitors. Nobody wants to sit at a desk all day staring at a 12" screen that's a centimeter away from the keyboard. Also, many enterprises require a wired Ethernet connection.
My other car is first.
Maybe if someone makes the software for the Mac...
s p
:)
http://www.aviinc.com/projectors-displays/wijet.a
There are wireless monitors.
I don't see the difference between plugging in to a dock or connecting two cables to use a real monitor and keyboard. (the mouse plugs into the keyboard) Three cables if you require wired networking. You could even get a wireless KVM switch if you didn't want as much clutter right on your desk or didn't want the cables to pull as much.
Are you really that lazy? Often docking stations cause the system to overheat, at least on the dell systems i've seen in the past.
On a side note, the smallest display apple sells is 13" widescreen now. You could always buy a MacBook Pro and get a 15" or 17" like most dell systems ship with.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
It's about time someone took notice of what is hopefully going ot be an emerging trend in the corporate world. Myself I administer a WAN of 10 user to about 7 machines. It used to be a commodity hardware+windows solution maintained by one person (me). I konw I'm opening myself up to a lot of criticism here, but for this small environment windows was a big problem. It's easy to say this, but securitywise it's a total PITA to be one guy administering a LAN/WAN of windows machines, especially when logins are shared (yes, bad I know... but we are small). Every other day I'd get calls about network issues or printers just disappearing for what seems to be without reason. A simple reboot would usually take care of whatever the problem was.
I think anyone reading slashdot would say that a reboot isn't such a big deal. I would tend to agree. I don't think the average person trying to enter in medical billing charges or look at a medical schedule of patients would agree however. In a service based industry, I am not a fan of keeping the customer any longer than ness. which means things just need to work. Something that windows was just not doing for me/our organization.
About a year and a half ago now, a friend came to me with a new 12" powerbook she had purchased with a question about configuring wireless networking. Apparently the (large enterprise) that she works for didn't have any IT staff skilled enough to figure out how to configure Airport to operate on their (windows centric) secure wireless network. So, sitting in her car in an Applebees parking lot I took a look at it (first time ever touching a mac with OS X on it) and had it figured and configured in about 30 seconds. I fell in love with it.
So after that short experience I did some reading and learning about how it works and what it is and isn't. I made a small leap. I gave my boss a 15" powerbook and ordered up a 17" powerbook for myself. After a couple of months and with the introduction of the mac mini and great pricing on the iMacs I had our organization switched to an all apple solution, and haven't had any issues with any of the machines running currently. In fact a windows application that we used to use for our medical billing and scheduling is now something holding us back, and to tackle that I use virtualization. Thankfully, the use of windows in a VM is for older patient accounts, since everything has been moved to a new mac based application ("Macpractice" if you're curious... We've been happy with it, as it runs on MySQL instead of PostgreSQL like our former application "Intergy" for those that want to know).
Even migrating everything to an Xserve just recently has proven painless and everything that I had running our enterprise on a G4 mac mini running tiger server migrated smoothly and only took a couple of hours of my time to get back to where it should be. The fact that the architechture changed (from G4 to Intel quad Xeon) wasn't even an issue. In fact the only issues I'm having at the moment is getting our legacy software back up and running in a VM so that we can continue to close out old accounts (as db conversion was cost prohibitive, so we still need to run it). And this is slightly trivial, since I don't need to run it in a VM, I just choose to, so I can take the former windows server and put it to use as a (free)NAS (server) somewhere else.
In summary, making the switch to Apple has left me with little to do outside of educating people to use only one mouse button and counseling them in their state of "culture shock" when confronted with somehting different than what they use at home or elsewhere. What I anticipated to be a hard switch has been more painless than upgrading to the latest version of windows. At the very least, I'm glad I'm salaried, otherwise I'd be making very little, considering how little I actually have to do anymore. To my windows counterparts (a friend of mine sells service contracts for PC's like craaazy), kudos to you for keeping the service industry alive.
Apple needs to put docking connectors on their laptops before they're going to be taken seriously in the enterprise.
Yes, you need to preserve those 8 seconds a day you spend plugging and unplugging those cables.