Macs Gaining Ground With Enterprises

Get a load of this one, PC fans: Computer World reports that more than ever before enterprises are turning to Macs. Yankee Group research firm recently conducted a survey of more than 700 senior IT administrators, and found that nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house, almost doubling the percentage from users surveyed two years ago.

Laura Didio from Yankee Group Research Inc. conducted the survey. Didio reports that a number of the businesses surveyed said they had 50 or 100 or even several thousand Macs deployed. Two years ago, 47% of those polled said they had Apple Inc. hardware in their environments.

According to DiDio, what's impressive is that Apple has put little if any official effort into the business part of the market. Apple's market share in the computer world has gone from 1-to-2% up to 8-to-10%. 21% of those surveyed reported they had more than 50 Macs deployed.

The most surprising reason cited for businesses adopting Macs was the ability to virtualize other operating systems, primarily Microsoft's Windows on Mac hardware. A number of respondents said they're using Mac hardware to load Windows Vista or Windows XP.

28% of the firms surveyed said they were running Windows in a virtual machine on the Macs. 22% of those surveyed confirmed that their Macs were set up to boot either Windows or Mac OS X using Apple's built-in dual-boot Boot Camp utility. 8 out of 10 of the people surveyed rated Mac hardware reliability as either 'excellent,' or 'very good.'

In a draft of a report based on the survey that DiDio will soon release, she wrote that 'there's no doubt that user confidence in the reliability of both the Macintosh hardware and software products is having a tangible impact on corporate purchasing and deployment trends.' (Source: internetnews.com

One drawback causing businesses to hold off swapping-out current hardware for Apple's across the board is the limited number of management tools available for Mac OS X. Mac OS X tools make up for this with Spotlight, iChat and Time Machine which do help make a compelling case to install Macs.

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