So with the announcement of the withdrawal from sale of the 'Xserve'; have Apple finally abandoned the Enterprise? Actually to abandon something, you would have had to have been serious about it in the first place and Apple have never really been serious about the Enterprise and certainly the Data Centre. Pointing people at the Mac Pro or the Mac Mini is not really a serious suggestion is it?
Apple have never had and I suspect are never likely to have a serious Data Centre presence in the world of Corporate IT but are we going to see Apple attack this from a different angle. We all know that Steve Jobs loves the ability to control the whole stack from top to bottom and I don't think he is yet ready to completely abandon any ambition that Apple have in the Corporate IT space; indeed, I think that he has been heartened by the user-driven success of the iPad and iPhone in the Corporate space and there is a realisation that he cannot compete with the traditional corporate suppliers on their own ground. So, he's going to try to move it to his ground.
The creation of the OSX app-store is simply the first shot across the bows; the ability to manage the applications on your Mac device in the same way as managing them on your iPad, iPhone (or indeed your Android device) will put a huge amount of pressure in Corporate IT suppliers to provide the same desktop experience to their users. I suspect Microsoft are going to come under an increasing amount of pressure from their corporate customers to provide similar functionality to allow application management by end-users.
But the current Apple app-store does not really provide corporate customers with the level of control that they require and also, it will be completely unmanageable at scale; for this to be a true corporate play, we are going to need corporate app-stores where a corporate end-user can log into and download/install the apps which their employer have licenses for. However, once you get used to consuming applications in such a model; it is simply a better way of managing things.
And I wonder if this will be Steve's next play for the Enterprise? Or perhaps Apple are truly about to dump the Enterprise and become a consumer-only company. If he doesn't do it; Google will do it as part of Chrome OS, if that ever sees the light of day as a non-beta product.
I suspect even the faithful of the media-world are getting a little nervous with the current behaviours of Apple; for example no FCP refresh until 2012 in a technology area which is changing incredibly quickly with new demands being made all the time is a little worrying for many of them.
2011 is going to be an interesting year for Apple watchers.
Perhaps Jobs is looking to take a page from the Gates playbook and attacking the enterprise from the client side as Microsoft did when they became the dominant force in the desktop space and used that as leverage to get into the data center with NT. The parallel here would be to use the growing number of iPhones and iPads in the enterprise as an entry point to the data center. Who knows, maybe we’ll all be using iPads someday to access docs from an Apple iServer!
The reality is that in their market it didn’t make sense to offer a dedicated server model.
They are going to simply acknowledge what was ALREADY going on in that lots of people at universities were using the Mac Pro Towers for their servers to support their mac users.
Why not offer a combined workstation/server instead of having a totally separate product?
Make perfect sense to me.
Universities might put towers in their computer rooms; Enterprises won’t, we want rack-mount, standard form-factors. What Apple has done actually causes us problems; so unless they let us run OSX server on non-Apple hardware, we’ll be looking at alternatives…in fact our creative teams were already looking at alternatives, this further pushes them in a different direction.
Perhaps, we’ll see some unholy server alliance between Cisco and Apple; with Apple certifying OSX Server to run on UCS…not a particularly edifying scenario really.
I remember when the XServe launched, I was excited. I must have sent the links to the announcement to everyone I could think of, only to be dismissed. At the time Apple was interestingly humble about their approach. They kept reiterating they were newcomers to the space and that they were learning. Then came the full page ads on a black background in every magazine I could find. Then… silence.
Shutting this down was inevitable if not frustrating. In enterprise, it’s rough to see a good brand go away.