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In a survey conducted by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance, 235 of the 314 respondents expect to increase the number of Macs within their organization. Less than 2% of the responding organizations said they expected to reduce the number of Macs. The survey also shows that productivity gains and employee preference are the primary drivers of enterprises adopting Macs, with lower cost of ownership also playing an important role. The respondents were IT administrators, nearly 60% of whom manage 100 or more Macs within a wide range of enterprise class organizations.
Significantly, 91% of the IT administrators indicated that integration and management parity between Macs and PCs were major issues of importance to their organization. It is clear that organizations want to be able to manage all systems and platforms in one consistent manner.
"The importance of integration and management parity with PCs is an indication that the Mac users realize that getting Macs is easier to do if they can be managed," said Laura DiDio, principal analyst at Information Technology Intelligence Corp. "The broad trends of Macs continuing their penetration are reinforced by the results of this survey."
When queried more deeply about issues related to managing Macs, the IT administrators identified the following as major issues/concerns. The percentages reflect the number of respondents who selected an item. Most identified more than one issue:
• Integration with Active Directory (58%);
• Client management (inventory, patches, compliance) (53%);
• File sharing (42%);
• Configuration consistency (38%);
• Application compatibility (27%);
• Non-standard management utilities (26%);
• Security (19%);
• Data recovery (12%).
"The survey corroborates our finding that organizations are integrating the Mac and are seeking those solutions that allow the Mac to be managed the way PCs are managed," said Jim Chappell, vice president of business development for Centrify. "Each of the Enterprise Desktop Alliance solutions help companies increase IT acceptance of Macs in the enterprise by integrating Macs into their Windows managed environment and reducing the total cost of ownership."
Conducted during November and December of 2008, the survey had three primary objectives: to measure organizational commitment to the Mac within large organizations, to assess the importance of Windows-Mac integration, and to identify key IT management and administrative priorities related to the integration of the Mac. Details regarding the survey questions and responses can be found in a survey report published at the EDA website.
The survey was conducted by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance, a collaboration among enterprise-class software developers to make it easy to deploy, integrate and manage Macs in a sophisticated, Windows-managed IT environment.
About the Enterprise Desktop Alliance (EDA)
Enterprise Desktop Alliance (enterprisedesktopalliance.com) solutions are specifically designed to maintain the Mac experience for users even as they interface with the Windows infrastructure. At the same time, by extending the standard Windows-based management environment, EDA solutions enable the Mac to be viewed and to act as a peer to Windows in an enterprise.
Using the solutions from EDA companies, IT administrators can deliver the same standards of service, maintain uniform client configuration, enforce the same security controls, make the same sharepoints and print queues available, deliver the same disaster recovery, and enforce the same compliance policies for both Mac and Windows systems. And those same capabilities can be applied to the virtual version of Windows that runs on the Mac.
The cross-platform solutions available from the Alliance members address Enterprise Data Protection — Atempo; Identity & Access Management — Centrify; File Sharing & Print Services — Group Logic; Systems Lifecycle Management — LANrev; and Virtualization — Parallels.
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