Kenny Hemphill
The writing has been on the wall for some time, at least since Apple quietly stopped selling the Xserve Raid a few years ago. When it first announced the Xserve way back in 2002, it was heralded as evidence that the company was taking the enterprise market seriously. Mac OS X Server was known by then to be a robust, feature-rich server operating system, and the Xserve seemed like the ideal machine on which to run it.
For the first time, a Mac could be housed in a 1U rack, operated headlessly and compete with the best hardware competitors had to offer. It would be easy, then – too easy, in fact – to see the decision to axe the Xserve as a reversal, a sign that Apple no longer regards the enterprise market as important, or that it no longer feels able to compete there.
That would be a mistake. Apple has decided to axe Xserve, that’s all. It has taken a cold, commercial decision that that particular product no longer makes good business sense. It’s a tactical decision, not a strategic one.
The evidence for that can be seen in Apple’s software releases and in the sales of the iPhone and iPad. Take Mac OS X Snow Leopard, for example. One of the most significant features of the last version was support for Microsoft Exchange.
To quote Apple’s own sales literature ‘with Snow Leopard, the Mac has out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, something even Windows PCs don’t have’. This means that for the first time, Mac users can use Mail, iCal, and Address Book with Exchange Server (as long as it’s at least the 2007 edition), rather than having to use the Mac version of Outlook.
Its iWork applications may be targeted at smaller businesses and home users, but Keynote and Numbers are powerful enough to go head to head with PowerPoint and Excel in any corporate environment. Moreover, it still sells Xsan 2, its file system for sharing Raid storage over a fibre channel network.
Then there’s the iPhone and iPad. To those who claim that Apple is getting out of the enterprise market to focus on consumers, they’re oft-quoted examples of this supposed strategy.
However, the iPhone is far more than a consumer device, and Apple has been successfully marketing it to large corporations since day one. The iOS support for Exchange is better than Mac OS X’s, as the Mail app can happily talk to servers older than Exchange 2007. Furthermore, the iPhone supports Mobile Device Management, which allows large businesses to easily manage scaled deployments of iPhones across their organisation.
Likewise, the iPad has been widely adopted by businesses, publishing companies, football teams and even dentists. Indeed, many of the most popular iPad apps are aimed at businesses, and as recently as the beginning of November, analyst firm Gartner urged large enterprises to adopt the iPad. Gartner CEO Stephen Prince said: ‘It is not usually the role of the CEO to get directly involved in specific technology device decisions, but Apple’s iPad is an exception… It is more than just the latest consumer gadget; and CEOs and business leaders should initiate a dialogue with their CIOs about it if they have not already done so.’
The Mac Pro, while not an ideal replacement for a rack-mounted server, is a very capable enterprise machine and the decision to sell a version of the Mac mini with Mac OS X Server installed was taken in response to customers buying up Mac minis in bulk and using them as servers.
Simple economics may have determined that it makes more sense for Apple to deploy Mac OS X Server on the Mac Pro and Mac mini, rather than the Xserve, but that doesn’t mean Apple is abandoning its business customers.
Nevertheless, the Xserve is a remarkable piece of engineering, effectively squeezing a Mac Pro, with hot-swappable hard drives and a second Ethernet controller, into a sliver of aluminium less than two inches thick. I for one will be sad to see it go.
