Silicon.com took a poll of its CIO jury pool, which declared Apple "irrelevant" to todayis businesses, citing price as the biggest issue. With comments from IT directors, CIOs, and CTOs, the group taking part in the discussion had little positive to say about Apple solutions in their respective IT departments.

Richard Steel, head of ICT for Newham Borough Council told Silicon.com that "[Apple is] still an expensive fashion accessory in the consumer market and niche for business."

Dismissing Appleis superior track record for security, Ted Woodhouse, IT director at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, told the magazine that Mac OS Xis reputation for being more secure is merely an issue of Security through Obscurity, and not for any technical or fundamental differences in the way Apple approaches security.

"Virus writers aim to cause maximum disruption," Mr. Woodhouse said, "and attacking the Mac community will not do that any more than attacking the Linux desktop community will. If Mac or Linux, for whatever reason, become massively successful, and massively more market-dominant, then we all know where the malware authors will redirect their ethically misguided efforts."

On the slightly more positive side, David Yu, the CTO for Betfair, an online betting exchange, said that his company "wonit change our core platforms or strategy, but it does stress the need for web-based companies to improve support for the valued Mac population. We had already rebuilt our site to better support non-Windows platforms."

Such comments illustrate Appleis ongoing, uphill battle to make its way into the very lucrative IT business. The company has released Xserve, Xserve RAID, Xsan, and Xgrid, all products and technologies aimed at the Enterprise space, but clearly not everyone is paying attention.

Appleis total sales to this market, while growing, still represent only a tiny percentage, and hardly register when compared to IT powerhouses like Dell, IBM, and HP.

Still, Apple is not without success in this space. Sales of Xserve have been growing, and Xserve RAID in particular makes Apple among the price/performance leaders in the storage market. In January, for instance, Cisco chose Xserve, Xserve RAID, and Xsan to power a major expansion of its e-mail archival system, a major coup for the company.

You can read all of the CIO Jury comments at Silicon.com.