Apple's Yuletide enterprise conundrum

[MacBytes]

Category: Opinion/Interviews
Link: Apple\'s Yuletide enterprise conundrum (http://www.macbytes.com/link.php?sid=20041208132808)
Posted on MacBytes.com (http://www.macbytes.com)

Approved by Mudbug

[shadowfax]

Man, that kind of pissed me off. The guy was just ranting without any real knowledge:

let's presume that they doesn't have an enterprise strategy (think: miltibillion dollar company... XServe... IBM/VA Tech supercomputers... NO! they don't have an enterprise strategy, just because i say so), and then he said ORACLE was giving them one. Could it be that oracle is INTO them BECAUSE they have a DAMN GOOD enterprise schedule? nah, that'd make apple look good, like they know what they're doing, and prove i'm an ass****!

did it never occur to this guy that Apple has some of the most talented leadership in the industry--in any industry? Did it never occur to him that apple's novel enterprise strategy might be something like "make a great, reliable product, make it affordable, and enterprise will come to us"? Because, as he observes, this strategy is obviously working in the case of Oracle, and the IBM rumor backs it up.

fie!

[gregnacu]

Yeah, what an idiot.

I think he should lay off the analogies which seem to serve no other purpose than to veil what he's really trying to say. Like XSan and XServe, and Mac OS X Server licences are all just a pale shadow before the almighty iPod. Oracle doesn't give two shlits about the iPod. They are coming to Apple because they have a Great set of solutions.

That guy was just a fool.

[kronos2611]

I think the article really is down to perspective. In the UK Apple have not made any great progress in the Enterprise. They do great in the arts, television, film making and music but the IBM and HP dominated big companies - they've never done much and I doubt ever been seen as a serious choice. With Apple now having a big global customer like Oracle onboard who are a vendor in nearly every big corporate can only be a good thing, the question is where to take it now.

I'm in the storage business and to be honest for all bar the most low end of coprorate uses the Xserve RAID can't compete in terms of features. However the XServe RAID has one big advantage - cost. With the current talk of virtulisation and placing your less used or unimportant data on cheap storage - Apple might have a niche if they can keep the price down. Certainly the whitepapers they have on their own website say point blank they are a low end storage vendor. If they can partner up with Oracle& IBM to sell packaged Oracle 10g solutions with maybe IBM Linux boxes at the front and Xserve RAID at the backend that might at least start to get them taken seriously in the enterprise.

Now what would be very interesting would be a Storage partnership with IBM and put Xserve RAID at the bottom rung of the DS range, who knows maybe even replacing the lowend DS systems at the moment which IBM re-badges anyway...