Report: Apple to make significant enterprise gains in 2011
Despite Apple's insistence that it is a mobile device company, it turns out that the Mac category is far from done growing. A new study from the Enterprise Desktop Alliance says that 2011 is set to be a huge year for Mac on the enterprise level, with reportedly 25 percent of all new systems in that category being Macs. That would be astonishing, and would move the Mac from the current figure of 3.3 percent of enterprise systems up to 5 percent. All of this growth, says the EDA, will primarily come from companies who have already chosen Apple's technology for their systems -- they'll just be buying more of it.
Why all the growth? Most of the respondents said that "parity in integration and management between Macs and PCs" was the biggest deal for them, and certainly Apple has moved strongly in that direction recently, with the switch to Intel chips and more compatible software than ever. Businesses also cited security as a concern, and while it's not specifically mentioned in the report, you have to believe that the huge emergence of the iPhone and the iPad in the business world has done something to drive adoption of the Mac in that environment as well.
Enterprise Mac sales are already gigantic, but according to what enterprise customers are saying, they're going to get even bigger in the next year.
