慢慢地，但肯定的是，苹果正悄悄进入企业。有可能是上，由于管理员不愿意和微软的近乎垄断的一些斜体字“慢”，但很多IT专业人员都得到他们的苹果的第一口味，包括Leopard中的新的基于企业的功能，提高管理能力，以及渴望那些的Macbook Air（好吧，也许）之一。
只是事实的，夫人
Corporate interest in Macs is up dramatically among IT executives, driven by changes in what the Mac has to offer, by Apple's success in the consumer market and its other niches, and by corporate trends where, thanks to virtualization and a migration to Web-based applications, Windows' grip on the desktop may be starting to loosen just a bit.
"I'm getting more and more questions about bringing Macs into the enterprise and what it would take," says Tim Bajarin, president of strategic consulting firm Creative Strategies Inc. in Campbell, Calif.
Charles Smulders, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., says he too has experienced a substantial increase in Mac inquiries from corporate customers.
在Mac的兴趣激增是两种发展从2006年的直接结果是：第一，发展更多的Windows友好，基于X86的英特尔Mac，和第二，引进新兵训练营中，这使得一个完整的Windows环境和应用补充到任何一台Mac在一个单独的硬盘分区上本地运行。
Boot Camp, in particular, garnered a lot of attention out the gate. According to Apple, 1.5 million copies of the beta version of Boot Camp were downloaded before the program's release as part of the Leopard version of OS X. The full integration of Boot Camp into Leopard has spurred some IT managers to actively review the potential of OS X as an alternative for general business computing.
While most of the Santa Monica-based IT consultancy 318's clients that use Macs extensively are in the video, sound and advertising realm, director of technology Charles Edge says he is seeing more nontraditional customers willing to make a move. "We have two energy companies and a fountain design company that switched [from Windows] to Macs last year," he says. None of those, however, were large companies, meaning those with more than 500 employees.
No love from daddy
这里有一个问题。“苹果会告诉你，他们都集中在[商用业务市场]，但在这一天结束，这不是一个大的优先对他们来说，” IDC分析师大卫·达乌德说。
An Apple spokesperson said the company does support corporate customers but declined to elaborate on Apple's enterprise strategy.
That ambivalence is a concern for IT managers like Dale Frantz, CIO at Auto Warehousing Co. (AWC) in Tacoma, Wash., which last year began a corporate-wide project to migrate to Macs across 23 locations. "The biggest weakness at this point I'd say is the lack of a cohesive enterprise strategy on the part of Apple," he says.
Outside of a few large media and advertising firms, corporations are simply not one of Apple's core markets. "There is no pretense on their part that the next mountain they have to conquer is the enterprise," says Bajarin.
服务和支持是另一个障碍。“你从不是致力于支持大型企业需求的供应商转移到了一个平台，从我们所看到的，可用的工具和支持[制定这一变化]不是企业级的，” Smulders说。
方程的支持方面,小型和守护神ge companies with just a few Macs to support can find themselves caught in between Apple support offerings. Apple does offer enhanced support for larger customers. "There is an enterprise agreement where you pay [US]$50,000 and you get stellar support, including a dedicated support guy," says Edge. "They really go all out."
But that kind of money may not fit into the budget of companies with just a few dozen Macs in the marketing department or that of smaller companies. According to Stephan Pinheiro, president of the Montreal-based Apple resellers humanIT and Mac 911, he can definitely sometimes find it a little lacking when it comes to Apple's supporting its enterprise customers. While there has been an improvement over the last few years, he said, Apple has struggled with providing budget-friendly and effective support and service.
How can we (not) serve you?
Apple's constellation of server products--Xserve, Leopard Server and Xsan--are intended to service the small business and departmental islands of Macs in its core markets rather than corporate at large. Improvements in the operating system on the desktop and server products have been mostly consumer- and small business-oriented. Leopard Server, for example, focuses heavily on ease of setup for small business and offers a suite of workgroup-oriented tools.
But Apple has beefed up some features that are important to corporate users. Integration problems with Microsoft's Active Directory---a big sticking point that required third-party tools and work-arounds--have been resolved in the Leopard release. Users can now update their own directory profiles, and digital signing is now supported, allaying the fears of security-minded IT folks.
Adding to its appeal with administrators is the fact that OS X, unlike Windows, is based on the Unix operating system and open standards such as Samba file and print services, the NFS file sharing protocol, RADIUS secure remote access and LDAP directory services.
“为Mac作为客户机最大的吸引力是OS X的UNIX基础作为操作系统的稳定性，” AWC的弗朗茨说。而使用Mac电脑上的OS X Server网络提供了一些其他的好处的客户，他说，特别是在远程客户端管理和服务，远程磁盘映像和系统配置的领域。最后，如视频iChat的改进通讯工具也让支持更容易，他说。
In his consulting practice, Edge still runs across a few lingering problems. "There's still no way to cluster file-sharing services, which is a biggie," Edge says, and he's had some issues with fail-overs in active/passive clustering configurations.
But on the whole, it's much easier to plug Macs into a corporate setting than it was just 12 months ago.
它可能更便宜。在the server side, Apple has a licensing cost advantage over Windows. Apple's software licensing model was "a primary reason" why Frantz decided to standardize on Mac servers.
苹果Leopard的许可证服务器上的每个服务器的基础 - 没有客户端访问许可证（CAL）需要访问的文件共享，电子邮件，聊天，共享日历等基本功能。（然而，它的管理工具，苹果远程桌面，要么出售，10个并发用户或无限制的用户许可证）。“CAL管理和跟踪的软成本也是一个因素，”弗朗茨说，解释管理客户端访问许可证可以是一个头痛的问题。
The kids like it alright
With its server and desktop products, Apple is now in a good position to tempt corporations. And it's got something else going for it: an incredible amount of goodwill among rank and file computer users.
苹果正在销售大量硬件来证明这一点。不久前，其在美国PC出货量的份额徘徊在百分之三。如何时代的变化。2007年第三季度，Mac的PC出货量的份额攀升至6.9％，而29％的年同期增长，根据IDC。
In the laptop space, which is steadily eating away at the desktop market, Apple is rushing ahead. In the same period, it ranked fourth in laptop shipments, with a 9.7 percent share in the third quarter and year-over-year growth of 43.6 percent. To be sure, most of those machines did not ship to large businesses. "You have a really strong education market in the U.S., followed by a pretty good consumer market. The rest is pretty small," says Daoud.
That said, success in the home and education markets is creating a grass-roots lobbying effort that is starting to hit some IT organizations from all sides.
和期望 - - 更多的大学毕业生用的Mac体验加入公司的员工在拖。在乔治敦大学法律中心，学院的30,000名学生的近50％正在使用苹果电脑 - 从向上短短几年前不到百分之一的CIO巴勃罗·莫利纳说。同样的现象在技工学校如麻省理工学院，在Mac电脑现在在校园代表所有个人电脑的30％，比去年同期增长20％发生。
“在使用苹果电脑的这个令人难以置信的增长由大学生会施压IT部门支持的Macintosh电脑[在职场]，”莫利纳预测。
无论巴加林和边缘说，他们的企业客户已被新员工游说Mac电脑走近。巴加林说：“年轻的孩子谁在Mac上长大感到沮丧与他们报错工具。”
In some situations IT organizations also face pressure from the top to support Macs and even iPhones. "You now have executives who have cut their teeth on Macs and they're coming in at relatively high levels," Bajarin says.
And in a December 2007 e-mail poll of 1,400 IT consultants at Deloitte Consulting, 45 percent said they own a Mac. "We have a whole new generation of very tech-savvy super users saying, 'No, we won't use that. I'm not going to take a giant step backward on technology to come work for you,'" says Doug Standley, principal and lead in Deloitte's technology innovation strategies group.
The future's so white I gotta wear shades
Aside from cost, the primary reason that IT executives are keeping Macs out of the corporate setting is that they don't want to "break" the legacy environment, according to Standley. Deloitte's surveyed consultants estimate that 10 percent of its business clients are using Macs as a primary corporate tool, but if legacy issues were not a factor, perhaps 50 percent to 60 percent of that group would at least consider the Mac as the primary personal computing platform for general business use.
Those legacy concerns may be starting to fade. Traditionally, desktop hardware and operating systems were closely aligned with corporate applications built around Microsoft Windows. Now, the migration toward more desktop virtualization and Web-based technologies means corporations can operate in a more platform- and operating system-neutral manner. That has created a small opening for alternative platforms such as the Mac.
Some legacy programs are being rewritten as Web-based applications. In other cases, the "fat" client that normally runs on a Windows computer is being moved to a virtual PC environment, such as Citrix Presentation Server. The latter executes the user's desktop applications on back-end virtual PC servers and requires only a browser plug-in on the client for full access from any machine, be it a Windows, Mac or Linux client.
IT managers out and proud about Apple
Oregon State University's IT manager for the college community network Dave Nevin said, "Since I went to a Unix base, it's become easier to find people who are familiar with the core of the Mac OS," says Nevin. "So support is getting simpler because of that familiarity," He adds that Macs are faster to deploy than PCs and training users goes more smoothly. That said, PCs on the whole are easier to support since updates can be created centrally and rolled out to users automatically, but not as yet with Macs. That may change as the number of users justifies expenditures on Mac server support.
而一个趋势是要做出集中供养那么重要 - 越来越多地使用基于Web的应用程序。传统上，大多数应用程序是基于客户端的服务器，所以集中支持是强制性的成本效益。塔米·巴尔，与俄勒冈州的技术服务总监，但去到Web越来越多的需求的能力，操作系统的用户的类型变得不那么重要。
但无论是内文也巴尔看到苹果未来采用接近俄勒冈州立或企业电脑数量更普遍，只是还没有。
“最关键的因素是Mac电脑。苹果没有有效地锁定在企业市场，”内文说。“直到他们这样做，我认为你只看到零星采用，而不是大规模的转变。”
Forrester Research analyst J.P. Gownder agrees. "Apple is not trying to create holistic systems the way Microsoft would; Apple is designing to the end user."
你已经走过了漫长的道路，宝贝
在地面上，然而，IT经理和管理员发现它更容易掌握自己的Mac电脑，约翰·韦尔奇，堪萨斯城人寿保险在Unix /开放的系统管理员说。之前，他说，你有付出，深深地相当，开发工具。编写的Mac软件，尤其是东西，处于较低水平跟硬件，是不容易的，写的Mac软件前的Mac OS X是没有别的一样。有没有办法，只是下载，编译并安装你需要什么样的方式UNIX管理员做到了，而且没有尽可能多的商业基础设施，如Windows管理员了。
韦尔奇说，改变了与Mac OS X，以及更重要的是，苹果决定放弃其开发工具，如项目生成器/界面生成器，鲨鱼，石英作曲家，和其他人，与操作系统的每个副本。用户可以，在大多数情况下，从SourceForge上一样的地方下载各种工具的源，并在几个小时后，有工具和运行。