Mac deployment growing fast in businesses

Businesses are looking for Macs to integrate better with existing infrastructure

Apple Mac deployment is on the rise in businesses, according to a survey by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance (EDA), a group of vendors collaborating to better integrate Mac systems with Windows-based corporate infrastructures.

The survey canvassed IT administrators at 314 organisations across the US and EMEA, and found that nearly 75 per cent of those using Macs planned to increase their deployments. Only two per cent planned to decrease the number of Macs in use.

No single reason stood out as the major factor driving a Mac strategy, but the top responses were employee preference, productivity gains and lower total cost of ownership.

However, the survey found a strong accord among organisations on the need for integration and management parity between Macs and PCs, with 90 per cent of respondents regarding this as important.

"The survey corroborates our finding that organisations are integrating the Mac and are seeking solutions that allow it to be managed the way PCs are managed," said Jim Chappell, vice president of business development at Centrify, an EDA member enabling Active Directory-based authentication and access control for Mac systems.

Integration with Active Directory was identified as a major issue in the survey, followed by management of inventory, patches and compliance. Interestingly, application compatibility was listed as an issue by fewer than a third of companies taking part in the survey.

Other EDA members include LANrev, which provides cross-platform inventory and asset management, Atempo, which offers network backup-based tools, and Parallels, which enables Windows applications to run on Mac systems using virtualisation.