New alliance aims for Mac manageability in heterogenous systems

Can the "Mac experience" be made to co-exist better with mainly Windows environments? Members of a new alliance say so. The EDA wants to spur greater adoption of Macs in enterprises.

With various studies pointing to a boom in popularity for Apple's venerable Macs, five software companies banded together this week to form the Enterprise Desktop Alliance (EDA), a group aimed at making Macs more manageable in mostly Windows environments.

Essentially, the EDA seeks to extend the Windows-based management environment so that Macs can act as peers to Windows PCs in an enterprise, while still maintaining the "Mac experience" for end users, the new organization said in a statement.

Specific management functions targeted by the group include virtualization, identity and access management, enterprise data protection, systems life-cycle management, and file and print services.

Under the EDA's strategy, administrators will be able to deliver the same standards of service and enforce the same compliance policies across both Mac and Windows, while also applying these capabilities to the virtual version of Windows running on the Mac.

One of the founding members, Parallels, produces virtualization software for running Windows, Linux and other applications on Mac OS X desktops.

The other founders include LANrev, a maker of automated client management tools for Macs and Windows PCs; enterprise back-up solutions provider Atempo;
Group Logic, a producer of software for file and print sharing across Windows servers and Mac desktops; and Centrify, which sells a suite called DirectControl for extending Microsoft's Active Directory across multiple OS.

But are there enough Macs out there yet to warrant the EDA's efforts? Although hard data about Mac installations isn't all that abundant, some analysts have used Web metrics and sales statistics to prove rising usage share for Macs.

One way of estimating the actual density of certain types of machines in the installed base, as opposed to sales, is by determining how much of the world's Web browser traffic comes from certain machines. This is the approach analytics firm Net Applications takes. News sources have mistakenly referred to this as "market share." That's an inaccurate term, since "market" implies "sales;" Net Applications measures use.

Using Web traffic analytics, Net Applications currently estimates a 7.94% usage share for Macs, in comparison to 90.89% for Windows, 0.80% for Linux, 0.16% for iPhone; 0.93% for PlayStation 3; and 0.01% for the Nintendo Wii. That compares with a 7.07% usage share for the third quarter of 2007, according to Net Applications' analysis. Thus the statistics show that the rate of growth for Mac usage share based on Web traffic is about 4% per quarter -- not a lot, but growth nonetheless.

Relying on hardware sales numbers instead, blogger Daniel Eran Dilger estimated this month in Roughly Drafted that "Apple now has an installed base of around 16 million Intel Macs, but only about 7.5 million PowerPC Macs that are five years old or less."

About 6.5 million of those Intel Macs are new over the past nine months, since the arrival of Mac OS X Leopard, according to Dilger.

Yet if the installed base for Macs is climbing fast, nobody could convincingly argue that it no longer remains small in comparison to Windows-based PCs.

In establishing the EDA, the five founders are articulating a goal of pushing for broader adoption of Macs in workplaces. Yet unless an organization already has a hefty Mac user base in place, will administrators really pay much attention to the new group's integration approach? This could be a chicken-and-egg type question.