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Nearly 80% of businesses have Macs in-house, nearly double the percentage that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago, a research firm said today.
"Then, we were talking about onesies and twosies," said Laura DiDio, a research fellow at Yankee Group Research Inc. who conducted a survey of more than 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives. "Now the number of actual users is very significant. A number of the businesses said that they had 50 or 100 or even several thousand Macs deployed."
DiDio was impressed with the growth of Macs in business, considering that Apple Inc. has put little to no official effort into that part of the market. "This isn't a tidal wave, but it's certainly a sustained trend," she said. "Apple has a beachhead in business. Where it once had just 1-to-2% market share in corporate, now they're up to 8-to-10%," DiDio added.
Twenty-one percent of the firms surveyed reported that they had deployed more than 50 Macs. "This isn't Mickey Mouse; it's not just onesies and twosies anymore," DiDio said. "Apple's graduated into the big league."
Among the reasons businesses cited for adopting Macs, the most surprising was the ability to virtualize other operating systems, primarily Microsoft Corp.'s Windows, on Mac hardware.
More than a quarter of the firms surveyed — 28% — said that they are running Windows in a virtual machine on the Macs they have. Slightly fewer (22%) confirmed that their Macs are set up to boot either Windows or Mac OS X using the latter's built-in dual-boot utility, Boot Camp.
But while businesses are willing to bring in Macs, there's no indication that an appreciable number are considering swapping out current hardware for Apple's across the board. "Some have a problem with the management tools [available for Mac OS X]," said DiDio. "The tools are lacking, and the enterprise hardware and software support is not equivalent to what's available for Windows."