Nearly 80 percent of businesses have Macs in-house, nearly double the number that said they had users running Mac OS X two years ago, a research firm said Thursday. "Then we were talking about onesies and twosies," said Laura DiDio, a Yankee Group research fellow who conducted a survey of over 700 senior IT administrators and C-level executives. "Now the number of actual users is very significant. A number of the businesses said that they had 50 or 100 or even several thousand Macs deployed."

In early 2006, when DiDio last polled corporate IT professionals on Mac deployment, 47 percent said that they had Apple hardware in their environments. DiDio was impressed with the growth of Macs in business considering that Apple Inc. itself has put little to no official effort into that part of the market. "This isn't a tidal wave, but it's certainly a sustained trend," she said. "Apple has a beachhead in business. Where it once had just 1-2 percent market share in corporate, now they're up to 8-10 percent," DiDio added.

Posted: Jul 01, 2008 4:38 pm