BusinessWeek Looks At Apple's Chances In Enterprise

by , 12:00 PM EST, February 25th, 2004

For some, it was Apple's hiring of Sebastian Gunningham, an exec from Oracle, that was the signal that the company was going to get serious about the enterprise market and IT. For others, it was the introduction of Xserve and Xraid. Whatever the case, Apple has been working hard for the first time in many, many years to be a serious player in the enterprise, government, and other IT markets.

BusinessWeek's Alex Salkever says that while Apple has had some success in better positioning itself in this market, that positioning hasn't translated into a real foothold or significant sales. Mr. Salkever also says that it is not too late to change. From BusinessWeek:

Two years have gone by, though, and Apple has yet to make serious inroads into the corporate market. Worse, its efforts took a huge hit when [Sebastian] Gunningham quit in January to become the CEO of a small Miami-based software outfit. Apple says it remains committed to enterprise computing and is actively seeking a replacement for Gunningham.

That may be, but Gunningham's departure dredges up lingering questions. Can Apple ever escape its desktop perch and march into the data centers of America Inc.? And what does Apple have to show for the past two years of efforts to sell powerful servers to businesses?

The vacuum at the top of the corporate-computing division comes at a bad moment. For the first time in memory, Apple has server products that are extremely competitive on price and top-level performance with anything else on the market. Apple has also started rolling out interesting offerings to win market share in biotech and entertainment.

ANSWERING CRITICS.  At the same time, info-tech managers have finally begun to voice optimism and untie their purse strings. But if Apple wants to take advantage of its opportunity, it needs to quickly fill Gunningham's slot -- as well as take steps to reassure potential customers that it's in corporate computing for the long haul.

There's much more in the full article, and we recommend it as a very good read.

The Mac Observer Spin:

We pretty much agree with almost everything in this piece from Mr. Salkever. One of the things he pointed out is that it has historically taken some companies as long as five years to gain traction in the IT world. That would mean that Apple is doing just fine with its two year history of targeting that market. From our vantage, however, Apple faces a steeper challenge in that the company is going to have to prove to a lot of skeptics that it is not going to flake out and abandon this corporate effort.

That said, we know that Apple has done well in the government sector, and we think that this will eventually help out in the business world. Indeed, between that government success, Apple's super-aggressive pricing in the rackmount and RAID space, and Mac OS X's excellent Unix foundation, we think that Apple will eventually see some corporate sales. It's merely a matter of time.

BusinessWeek Article