The Apple logo is showing up everywhere these days, including this little guy's birthmark! With Apple's consumer assault led by iPod and iPhone, Macintosh computers are now finding their way back into enterprise and mid-market businesses at a surprising rate.
At KACE, at least 30% of our employees now use Macs full time and we're not alone. Rumors continue that Salesforce.com will soon go Mac enterprise-wide and InfoWorld recently ran an article claiming that "No" is no longer a defensible IT strategy when it comes to Macs. The case for Mac is bouyed by headlines like those listed above and users clamouring for slick new machines. Importantly, Microsoft itself may be pushing users to Mac in record numbers. In trying to be more Mac-like with Vista (and failing), Microsoft may be unwittingly pushing potential buyers to Apple. It seems almost everyone I know is either trying or buying Mac rather than fight to learn Windows Vista.
As recently as a two years ago, systems management vendors like KACE could get away with limited or no Mac support. Those days are over. KBOX products now feature extensive Mac and Linux support in addition to Windows. We find that while Macintosh may represent less than 10% of all machines shipped into mid-market businesses, nearly 100% of these businesses have at least a handful of Macs. So, cross-platform server and desktop management is important now more than ever. And the critical mass of Macs continues to grow.
As this trend continues Microsoft's own systems management strategy faces many challenges and risks in building its business. After all, what rational IT shop would choose a systems management platform that solely supports Windows? Whether you call it Microsoft SMS, Microsoft Systems Center, Microsoft MOM or Microsoft Systems Center Essentials... you're talking about a vegetable soup of offerings with a Windows only mentality that fails to embrace some of the biggest trends in IT, notably led by Apple, VMWare, RedHat, Ubuntu and others -- not Microsoft.
Last year, KBOX won the Most Innovative Product award at Micrsoft's own Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) tradeshow in San Diego. This year's event was held in Las Vegas earlier this week. I'm told by the KACE team that worked our booth at the show that a couple of Microsoft suits walked up to our booth and told us we couldn't exhibit our KBOX products at the show because we compete with the sacred System Center product line. They wanted us to pack up and leave because we don't integrate with Systems Center... nevermind that we do support Windows and several underlying Microsoft technologies and nevermind that our Appdeploy.com service is the largest free community for Windows systems administrators. After some push back, Microsoft backed off. Does this kind of behavior signal that Microsoft is finally feeling threatened?
Will Apple and others finally break down Windows? Judge for yourself. As for KACE, our KBOX products will keep delivering on a simple theme... Easy-to-use, systems management appliances that save IT professionals time and money regardless of what platforms or systems they choose.
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Someone recently (5/30/08) forwarded the following cover story posted in BusinessWeek around the same date that I posted the blog entry written above... coincidentally, it makes many of the same points.
The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit
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