Apple Should Go After the Corporate Computing Market: “I do have a market size estimate for servers, though. According to research firm Gartner (NYSE: IT), global server sales topped the $54.8 billion mark last year, up 3.8% from 2006. And Apple ain’t even playing that game. It doesn’t take much of a market share here to make a big difference.”
(Via The Motley Fool.)
Yes Apple should be going after the server market, but as I mention in my recent article, they’d be much better off going after it from the software side, rather than the hardware side. xServes are nice pieces of kit, no question, but if you look at the end use of a lot of those dollars in the server market, you’ll find that fewer and fewer are going to single purpose server installations, but as components in an overall virtualisation platform. And here, the Apple machines don’t have much to offer as a differentiator.
It’s true that even the xServes are better engineered that most of the 1U server offerings from DELL, HP, IBM etc. from an energy and a noise standpoint, but that’s unlikely to sway anyone who’s consolidating onto machines that need 6-10 network connections, and multiple redundant fiber channel cards (or even more ethernet connections for iSCSI). I haven’t deployed a 1U server in almost 2 years. Granted, I work in the virtualisation consulting business so I have a somewhat skewed view of things.
To top it off, the primary use of these machines is to run VMware ESX which is not qualified on this hardware. I haven’t checked to see if Xen will run on xServes, but Xen represents but a tiny portion of the overall market.
In the server market, Apple’s force isn’t so much in the hardware but in the software, more specifically in application integration. You can take OS X Server and plug it right into an Active Directory environment and start using all of the integrated applications with the Windows user accounts. Want IMAP access for all of your employees? Done. No Exchange CALs necessary. The CalDAV server looks awfully promising, but until someone comes out with a slick Outlook plugin, that still has a way to go. If Apple gets that one right, they have an Exchange killer on their hands.
You can even manage Active Directory accounts using the built-in user administration tools in OS X Server as long as you have the appropriate rights. You can delegate the administration for a mac-using department to a local administrator who does everything in OS X Server. It’s the software that makes the difference.
Plus you have all of the standard tools you expect to find on a Linux server (apache, php, ruby, rails, perl, python, postfix, cyrus, ipfw, …), plus the bonus that your developers and administrators use the same login accounts as they do for everything else. Played correctly, OS X Server has an excellent possibility of taking a huge chunk out of the Linux Server in the near term. Windows will take longer :-)
The one recurring complaint that I see from the pundit crowd about Apple in the enterprise is they can’t tolerate Apple’s secrecy about future plans. “Roadmaps! We want roadmaps!” they cry. My advice is the same advice I give to individuals: buy the computer/OS/application that meets your requirements today. As far as I can tell, buying into roadmaps is buying a pig in poke. Microsoft is famous for it’s roadmaps, but then not sticking to a) the schedule and b) the promises.
If you want a serious enterprise UNIX platform capable of integrating seamlessly into your current environment that comes with standards based applications, then buy OS X Server. If the functions you’re looking for are there today, you can pretty much bet that the next release will have more of the same only better. And in the rare situation where Apple decides to drop a major feature, you just don’t upgrade those server instances.
I think that Apple’s current grass-roots strategy is moving in the right direction. If there are enough users demanding iPhones and Macs on the desktop, eventually the IT administration is going to start asking the question about the servers. Going into full-on sales mode isn’t going to change the market dynamics.
One final note on the intersection of Apple and virtualisation: I’m seeing a lot of crossover in these markets. In my office, almost half of the virtualisation consultants and engineers have switched to Mac portables and I know at least one high profile virtualisation blogger that’s also a Apple user. The interesting side-effect of working in this industry is that you work with just about every OS and application out there and OS X talks to everybody seamlessly out of the box.