Should Large Publishing Businesses Buy Macs?

By: Erik Vlietinck - Last Updated: Fri 15 December 2006

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Gartner Analysts and Research Directors Michael A. Silver, Neil MacDonald, Ray Wagner, and Brian Prentice published a 6-page report on the 4th of December on the viability of Apple Macintosh as an enterprise platform. They conclude that the proliferation of Windows-centric applications limits enterprisewide adoption, but they also believe that OS-agnostic applications and changing attitudes are paving the way for more Macs to appear.

Macs are seeing a resurgence in the consumer market following the iPod’s and Apple Stores’ success. Macs are chosen by some users who have the option of buying their own PCs for work, while they continued to be used in some organisations by those who favour Apple’s designs. In official enterprise circles, the analysts say Apple is still strongest in specific niches, based on application requirements.

Gartner says such niches are expanding, and the adoption of the Intel processor, with its better virtualization capabilities, is improving Apple’s potential in the enterprise.

In favour of Apple speak the open source foundation of its Mac OS X, with Apple’s committment to the open-source community. The analysts see Apple contribute technologies such as its Darwin OS, Darwin Streaming Server, Safari’s rendering engine (drawing on the KDE project) and Bonjour (zeroconfiguration networking).

The report states that Apple’s innovations are not solely in the area of “ease-of-use” but rather in how its technology is applied as a wrapper on an integrated open-source solution. The thumbs-up from Gartner in this area is rather new and quite positive for Apple.

The Gartner analysts conclude that Macs continue to be popular in corporate graphics departments, education, the sciences and media production — especially video and audio production is taking off as a hotbed for Mac implementation, according to Gartner.

In most cases, and according to Gartner, Macs are replacing Unix and Linux workstations, rather than Windows PCs.

Compatibility between Mac OS X and Windows

The analysts believe that current application compatibility concerns will eventually lessen, as AJAX and web 2.0 take off. Gartner does estimate that the typical company still requires Windows for more than 70% of its applications, including many of their most critical ones.

But even then, the analysts say that Mac users who need access to corporate Windows applications (where native Mac versions are not available) can use remote presentation (for example, Citrix) or PC virtualization (such as Parallels Workstation or a forthcoming product from VMWare). Gartner also concludes that Apple’s traditional departments do well not replacing Macs by Windows PCs.

A significant application compatibility issue the analysts see is with Microsoft Office, specifically its role in Microsoft’s broader corporate collaboration strategy. Although Microsoft Office is available on the Mac, it lags far behind the Windows version in terms of collaboration features.

Of course, Mac OS X comes with its own integrated collaboration solutions such as Mail, iCal and iChat, but they are optimized for use with Mac OSX Server.

Mac OS X Is Secure

Gartner gives Apple credit for what it is doing with the security of the Mac environment.

However, they say Apple should commit to a specific length of time for which it will support an OS in advance, if they want to further appeal to enterprise users. The report takes as an example the patches released in 2005. These seem to support only Mac OS X versions 10.3 and 10.4. Some patches state specifically that versions of Mac OS X before 10.3 are not affected, but others don’t.

This leaves administrators with insufficient information to make a security decision, which is not good enough as far as Gartner is concerned.

Microsoft supports versions of Windows for a minimum of 10 years, while Red Hat and Novell commit to seven years of support for enterprise desktop Linux versions. Gartner says that Apple needs to make similarly explicit minimum commitments because — although the tighter architecture of Mac applications will improve the success rate of in-place upgrades — companies still need to allocate time to test all their applications before deployment, budget for annual maintenance on Mac OS X, and plan to execute and support the upgrade. All of this takes time, during which explicit security support is needed.

Another flaw for enterprise usage of Macs on a large scale, are the management tools available, according to Gartner. The analysts say that multi-platform tools do not support Macs to the same extent, or with all the same services, as Windows PCs.

Gartner’s analysts conclude that Apple will continue to advance in enterprise environments, but only at a relatively slow pace. That’s bad news for Wall Street, but not necessarily so for Apple and its long-term outlook, according to Gartner.