Thanks to the Peeve Farm for linking to my previous Apple gushing but Brian Tiemann doesn't quite get it right when he says "[t]hat's the enterprise market pretty well covered, if you ask me—Apple seems to be going after the big-iron crowd with a vengeance".
First of all, the 'big-iron' crowd turns its nose up at 20 year old Unix implementations as still being a bit green. Things like CICS, VMS, IMS and the rest of the mainframe alphabet soup that handles a remarkable part of the world of corporate IT is not going to be swapping over to Objective-C and the drinking the rest of the Apple koolaid anytime soon.
But there's lots of room for Apple to come up with new solutions for the enterprise. Here's a few things they're missing (and this is by no means an exhaustive list):
Blade Servers (for when 1U is not dense enough)
4 way + Servers (more power)
Security Appliances (attention to detail is key here)
Large Scale Remote Access Servers (sure Apple has dial-in via Airport but try supporting 500 road warriors that way)
Vertical Application Servers (Apple's only begun to plumb this one)
VoIP applications
In other words, Apple's still in humble phase, and rightfully so. It's got a long way to go before its business strategy fully unfolds. It's just that with the release of Apple's SAN solution, Xsan, negative minded Apple watchers can no longer even pretend that they're just trying to pick off limited vertical markets like video or genetics companies. There's a lot of growth potential left for new hardware and software solutions before Apple's enterprise market strategy has reached the mature phase of limited growth.
Posted by TMLutas at April 22, 2004 07:23 PM