Apple Macs: Designed for Design?

02.10.2009
For the duration of its existence, Apple's claim to fame has always been user experience and design. Steve Jobs' multi-million empire has easily dominated the multimedia electronics world through intuitive gadgets and elegant devices. But for the same reasons, Apple's offerings have appealed mainly to the consumer market. With the introduction of Apple devices built with Intel chips and the impending release of the new Mac OS X Snow Leopard, is Apple gearing up to take a larger bite of the fruit by entering the corporate market?

Jude Buyco, IT supervisor for global advertising agency McCann Erickson, seems to think so. As IT head of a company that has been using Apple Mac computers for close to 10 years, Buyco is confident that Apple has what it takes to enter the enterprise scene.

"There are Apple Macs right now that use Intel chips, so Windows operating systems can be installed on dual boot," he explains. "And there are programs today that allow for Windows applications to be ported to the Mac OS X."

The enterprise innovation landscape over the past few years has seen a lot of changes brought about by the need to cut costs while maintaining productivity during the recession. Innovations such as virtualization, consolidation and unified communication have enabled firms to be grounded even as the financial storm raged on.

One such technology--that Buyco sees as the deal breaker for those companies wanting to switch to Macs--is cloud computing, which allows users to access applications through the Web browser. "With enterprise software being ported to the Internet as Web applications, it's very possible that some companies may opt to switch to a Mac," he says.