Mac use in business on the rise, says survey

Mac use is set to increase in the enterprise, according to a report from the Enterprise Desktop Alliance.

According to the survey of 314 respondents, nearly three quarters of enterprises that already have Apple Macs plan to deploy more of them in the future.

The report highlighted a number of reasons for this, with employee preference being the primary reason for the increased adoption. The second reason was a perceived increase in productivity and lower total cost of ownership coming in third.

However, when asked if the iPhone had any influence on introducing Macs into the enterprise, the answer was a straight no' with no respondents selecting that as a reason.

The report also highlighted some of the challenges facing Mac adoption in business. The top issue, from 58 per cent of the respondents, was the need to increase Active Directory Integration. Client Management inventory, patches and compliance was the second concern at 53 per cent, while file sharing with other operating systems came in third at 40 per cent.

Of the respondents, 58.6 per cent have more than 100 Macs currently, while 46.7 per cent have more than 500.

The Enterprise Desktop Alliance report noted that the figures it obtained are consistent with other independent reports, such as the Yankee Group survey of 750 global IT administrators and Clevel executives that suggest that four out of five business have Macs in their networks, which is double the 2006 figure.

The reports quoted analyst Laura Didio who noted: "This isn't a tidal wave, but it's certainly a sustained trend."

"Apple has a beachhead in business. Where it once had just one to two per cent market share in corporate, now they're up to eight to 10 per cent."

Click here to read whether the Mac OS will ever be the business platform of choice.