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Apple pursuing 'aggressive expansion' in enterprise market
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Nov 11, 2014, 11:47 AM
 
Apple is engaging in an "aggressive expansion" into the enterprise market, Reuters reports. Sources tell the newswire agency that Apple has hired dedicated sales teams to talk with clients such as Citigroup. Apple is, moreover, said to be working in conjunction with "a dozen or so" developers -- such as ServiceMax and PlanGrid, which develop apps for managing field technicians and sharing construction blueprints, respectively. Apple is reportedly in talks to bring other developers into formal partnerships.

The sources say that sales teams have been talking to CIOs at various corporations, including Citigroup. ServiceMax, which counts Procter & Gamble and DuPont among its customers, has allegedly co-hosted eight dinners with Apple in the past year, during which about 25 to 30 CIOs and "chief service officers" showed up as the targets of sales and marketing pitches. On the record, ServiceMax's chief marketing officer, Stacey Epstein, will only state that about 95 percent of the firm's customers use Apple devices, ordering thousands of iPhones and iPads in a deployment. She adds that the field service market is worth about $15 billion.

On a related Apple effort, the partnership with IBM, sources say it's depending on IBM's predictive software, enterprise-level security, and data analytics to distinguish its upcoming suite of enterprise apps from efforts by Oracle and Microsoft. Apple may also have to contend with spearheads from Google and Samsung into the enterprise world.

Traditionally Apple has paid relatively little attention to the enterprise, preferring to focus on consumer sales. Experts suggest to Reuters, though, that Apple is hoping to counteract a deceleration in growth, particular evidenced by iPad sales that have declined for three straight quarters.
     
godrifle
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Nov 11, 2014, 02:10 PM
 
Great, because, you know, the new Mac mini dual-core is such a bad-ass enterprise level server for running Apple's iOS provisioning service. :roll eyes:
     
Grendelmon
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Nov 11, 2014, 02:26 PM
 
Silly Apple, they keep confusing the term "enterprise" with "small business."
     
Inkling
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Nov 11, 2014, 02:32 PM
 
If they want to expand aggressively in the enterprise/business market, they need more than sales teams. They need to improve Hunspell, the dreadful spell checker buried in OS X. It's bad in almost every way a spell checker can be bad. It lacks words in common use such as exceptionalism. And the look-up for misspelled words is so dreadful, it fails about a third the time.
Author of Untangling Tolkien and Chesterton on War and Peace
     
cashxx
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Nov 11, 2014, 03:30 PM
 
How about some server hardware again or allow OS X on VMWare running on non-apple hardware!
     
DiabloConQueso
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Nov 11, 2014, 05:15 PM
 
This article (and many previous articles) mainly revolve around iPads and iPhones in the enterprise market, and Apple's enterprise agreement with IBM concerns those devices almost exclusively as well.

Why would a consumer-level machine (Mac mini), OS X's spell-checker, or the ability to virtualize an OS X Server installation be brought up at all?
     
gskibum3
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Nov 11, 2014, 08:56 PM
 
cashxx, I run OS X with Server.app in Mac based VMs. I hadn't thought of running OS X on non-Apple hardware. Are you saying that OS X won't run in VMs on non Apple hardware?
     
DiabloConQueso
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Nov 12, 2014, 12:12 AM
 
That's correct -- no virtualization of OS X Server on non-Apple hardware -- part of the reason being OS X Server is now just a bundle of applications and additional services or service configurations that sit atop the standard client version of OS X, which is prohibited from being virtualized on non-Apple hardware.
     
besson3c
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Nov 12, 2014, 12:33 AM
 
Apple's OS X server strategy has always been weird, which has probably in and of itself driven customers away.

Why doesn't Apple just make all of their special OS X Server software a cloud service that is a part of iCloud? I don't see any reason why anybody needs to run OS X Server, aside from needing access to some pretty edge case sort of apps.
     
DiabloConQueso
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Nov 12, 2014, 09:33 AM
 
"I don't see any reason why anybody needs to run OS X Server, aside from needing access to some pretty edge case sort of apps."

What? You can't see any reason why a company would need to have an on-site server running server software?
     
besson3c
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Nov 12, 2014, 10:15 AM
 
Originally Posted by DiabloConQueso View Post
"I don't see any reason why anybody needs to run OS X Server, aside from needing access to some pretty edge case sort of apps."

What? You can't see any reason why a company would need to have an on-site server running server software?

Running OS X? Not particularly, not unless you want to run Final Cut Server or some other specialty software.
     
DiabloConQueso
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Nov 12, 2014, 11:27 AM
 
OS X Server manages Mac-homogenous and heterogenous networks easily.

OS X Server makes having a centralized Time Machine repository for many networked Macs simple and easy.

OS X Server makes account management for a Mac network easy.

OS X Server makes bringing up an internal wiki site easy.

OS X Server makes managing Software Updates easy and less bandwidth-intensive.

OS X Server is dirt cheap ($20).

Saying that you can't see a single reason at all that anyone would want to run OS X Server is a bit short-sighted. Having installed more than a handful of OS X Server installations on everything from little Mac minis for small networks to XServes and Mac Pros for larger networks in companies ranging from business development to iOS and OS X software development environments, I can assure you there's at least ONE good reason to run OS X Server and likely many more reasons.

Just because it doesn't precisely fit your needs doesn't mean that it doesn't address other peoples' needs.

Can you do most of these things with a Linux server or Windows server? Sure, with a couple exceptions. Could some of the services that a server provides be Cloud-based? Sure, but not all of them (file sharing, for example, is completely infeasible to relegate to the Cloud in many situations).
     
Grendelmon
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Nov 12, 2014, 12:00 PM
 
Originally Posted by DiabloConQueso View Post
OS X Server manages Mac-homogenous and heterogenous networks easily.

OS X Server makes having a centralized Time Machine repository for many networked Macs simple and easy.

OS X Server makes account management for a Mac network easy.

OS X Server makes bringing up an internal wiki site easy.

OS X Server makes managing Software Updates easy and less bandwidth-intensive.

OS X Server is dirt cheap ($20).
Wow. I didn't realize that 1) OS X Server was so cheap these days, and 2) it appears to be an add-on package on top of the desktop OS? When did this all happen?
     
DiabloConQueso
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Nov 12, 2014, 12:13 PM
 
Lion, I believe? Maybe Mountain Lion? Sometime close after Snow Leopard.

Mac OS X Server (with the exception of 1.0) has almost always been simply an add-on package atop the client version of OS X -- even for the server versions that were sold separately (like Snow Leopard). You can turn a client install of OS X into a "server" version of OS X without the OS X Server package, you just need to be familiar with the command-line, starting and configuring services, or proficient in finding 3rd-party software that will do all that for you.

In other words, the client version of OS X already has everything needed to turn it into OS X Server for the most part, it's just that many of the services aren't configured or are disabled and need to be enabled. FTP, SSH, DHCP, file sharing, SAMBA, AFP, NFS, OD, etc. -- all those services exist already on your client OS X installation, they're just not configured and/or active.
     
Grendelmon
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Nov 12, 2014, 12:25 PM
 
Aye, I understand that. We ran OS X Server about 15 years ago. It was just a fancy GUI for AFP and common services. But it came on a shiny installation DVD with the full blown OS.

What I didn't realize was that Apple now sells it in the App Store!? That must be why it's so cheap now.
     
DiabloConQueso
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Nov 12, 2014, 12:29 PM
 
Yep, I've still got the CDs for OS X Server 1.0 and some CDs and/or DVDs going back to OS X Server 10.2 and 10.3 around here somewhere.

From nearly $1,000 to $500 to $200 to $20... it's been a long and winding road, that's for sure.
     
   
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