Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Apple's Rising Mac OS X Tide

Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X posted a record gain that brought it close to a 10 percent share for the first time...

What the heck? When did that happen? I knew that Apple's share was increasing but this InfoWorld fact took me by surprise. That certainly explains why more and more companies that I've been meeting with are asking about integrating their now officially supported Mac OS X machines into their Windows environments.

Then I was reading ComputerWorld's "Juicy Predictions for '09" and caught this one, too:

Apple will be a big winner in 2009 with products such as the iPhone and the Mac. With Exchange integration built into the iPhone and promised for the Snow Leopard release of OS X, Apple is poised to make some strong business inroads. -- Michael Gartenberg, Computerworld columnist and vice president of mobile strategy at Jupitermedia Corp.

The Mac has truly swung from being the office joke to becoming a serious part of many corporations infrastructure. Even when the Mac is not officially supported it tends to be officially tolerated. It was amazing at Quest how quickly we adopted support for the iPhone once our company president started using one - in addition to his MacBook.

Quest Software pioneered the integration of Unix and Linux systems with Active Directory and were also the first to extend Group Policy's benefits and capabilities to these platforms. For a number of years we have supported Mac OS X but in the last few months we have really beefed up our support in, what I consider are, ground breaking ways.

The basic concepts of what we do for Mac OS X are spelt out in this new white paper: Managing Macs in a Windows World

Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to give you a deeper dive into the investments we've been making to support this more present platform. Stay tuned!

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