T he Mac Observer has mentioned before that Apple has been slowly and steadily putting the right tools in place to once again be relevant in the corporate market. The company long ago ceded the corporate space, save a few in-house graphics houses, but recently those renewed efforts have been coming to the foreground. From the Xserve, to technologies built into Mac OS X Server and Mac OS X, to Keynote, to new financial services aimed at businesses, to new sales teams devoted to Enterprise sales, Apple has been stacking up the tools in its corporate tool box.
We havenit yet seen any direct evidence in the way of increased market shares and major companies adding Macs to their networks; but we have seen a big increase IT journalists, including professionals that write on the side, talking up the Mac. A more direct suggestion that Apple is doing well with IT types comes to us from Wall Street. Yesterday, the S&P released a report that said, of all things, that Apple, along with IBM and Dell, would benefit from an increase in IT spending. From a statement released by the S&P:
A full recovery is dependent upon growth in corporate spending, which until now has been constrained by a persistent atmosphere of caution. Once a full recovery is in place, a rebound in spending on high-end systems may take somewhat longer to develop, which will delay a recovery for some companies, according to the report.
"Dell, Apple, and IBM are all expected to be early beneficiaries of IT spending improvement," said Standard & Pooris credit analyst Martha Toll-Reed. "The prognosis for HP is less clearly positive and more dependent upon management execution, while revenue improvement for Sun and Silicon Graphics is expected to lag behind other hardware companies rated by Standard & Pooris."
You can read the full statement at Yahoo!is Web site.