Apple may not be known as an enterprise commodity, in fact, unless you are in marketing or creative you most likely don’t have a Mac on your desktop, but on one front adoption might be about to grow. A few days ago Apple announced that the iPhone is ready to work with Microsoft Exchange, the most widely used email system in the enterprise, and I am excited. There are some hurdles to be sure, AT&T simply cannot be the only carrier that the iPhone works with, and we need more control over that computer than Cupertino wants us to have; but this is good news for us in the enterprise nonetheless. By the way, the iPhone is just that, a computer. It just happens to have a cell phone in it too.
The operating system that all Macs run is a form of UNIX at its heart. If you are not aware of UNIX, it is an amazingly powerful and stable system that the entire Internet was built upon, it is the operating system that IBM, Sun and Hitachi all spent billions of dollars making sure it was solid and true. When Apple bought NeXT in 1996, they did so for a number of reason, not least of which were that Steve Jobs was the head of NeXT, and the operating system that fueled the NeXT ascent was UNIX based. NeXT had built a development environment called OpenStep which ran on their own UNIX called NeXTstep. NeXTstep was fully compliant with other UNIX operating systems, so you write your application to run on Sun’s Solaris platform and then you could build it on NeXTstep; or your write it on NeXTstep and then run it on IBM’s AIX platform with some minor tweaking. Microsoft’s environment ensured that an application you write on Microsoft would only run on the Microsoft operating system. Open versus closed at the core.
Flash forward ten years and now the Mac environment is the darling of college kids, audiophiles and developers alike. So where does Apple fit in to the enterprise world of WinTel, word processors and spreadsheets? Well, for one, the MacBook Pro runs Microsoft’s XP and Vista faster than other laptops on the market; according to PC World. Compound that with the Leopard operating system, again, a true UNIX with a glossy graphical interface, and you can see the allure.
Apple has been winning a share in the server rack too. Think of the power, style and dependability of the Mac as your server and you can see the Xserve line has a niche to fill. The Apple server offering is built on Intel quad-core architecture and delivers 64-bit UNIX. Remember those college kids I mentioned earlier? The ones using the MacBook now? They were most likely taught a flavor of UNIX in college if they are a developer, and if they are from the network side of the house then a Linux of some sort has surely graced their multi-boot home PC at some point. That means that they can use the Xserve line day one to run your companies accounting systems, the database or even the website your marketing VP keeps telling you about.
If Apple can persuade some of the developers of the Windows platform business suites to venture into Mac territory it would be good for the consumer. I know, at first it sounds a little scary; your IT professionals are not up to speed on the Mac OS or hardware, but they are techies right? They will learn. It will cost some time and money, but the power and elegance that could be gained for outweigh the costs.
I hope that we see more from Apple in the way of enterprise offerings soon, until then we will just have to run Vista inside the OS X system and still have speeds that beat other computers.
The first web browser, WorldWideWeb, was written on NeXTstep by Tim Berners-Lee on February 26, 1991. So that makes the NeXT box he wrote it on not only the first browser, but the first web server too. The core of the iPhone is the same operating system that all other Macs run, OS X, so in a way it’s a direct descendant of that first web server too. Poetic huh?
Links of interest: UNIX is an open standard, shepherded by The Open Group, can you get more ‘open’?
Tags: Apple, Hitachi, IBM, iPhone, Sun, UNIX
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