Yankee Group Research Inc. has recently conducted a survey showing that nearly 80% of businesses are running Macs in-house, almost double the percentage of two years ago.
“Then, we were talking about onesies and twosies,” said Laura DiDio, a research fellow at Yankee Group Research Inc. who conducted a survey of more than 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives. “Now the number of actual users is very significant. A number of the businesses said that they had 50 or 100 or even several thousand Macs deployed.”
In early 2006 DiDio had polled numerous corporate IT professionals on Mac deployment in which 47% had claimed to have had Apple hardware in their environments. Impressed with the overall turnout of Mac usage in the corporate sector, considering what little effort had been put into this part of the market, DiDio noted “This isn’t a tidal wave, but it’s certainly a sustained trend. Apple has a beachhead in business. Where it once had just 1-to-2% market share in corporate, now they’re up to 8-to-10%.”
Twenty-one percent of the firms polled in the survey had noted the use of 50 or more Macs in operation. Enterprise use on this scale shows Apple’s graduation into the big leagues.
“Among the reasons businesses cited for adopting Macs, the most surprising was the ability to virtualize other operating systems, primarily Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, on Mac hardware. “That’s clearly spurring some businesses,” DiDio said. “A number of the respondents said, ‘Oh, guess what, we’re using the Mac to load Vista or XP on there and using Mac hardware.”
Over one fourth of the firms surveyed said they are running Windows in a virtual machine on the Macs that they currently have. 22% have noted that their Macs are set up to boot either Windows or Mac OS X through the use of Boot Camp.
In a soon to be released report, DiDio writes “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.”
There is no doubt that Macs are becoming a far more viable choice to run in enterprise settings. IT guys be warned, your days may be numbered.
Full article here.
