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
http://enterprisedesktopalliance.com/survey_results.html .
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