According to a survey conducted by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance, 260 IT administrators from large organizations with both Macs and PCs said that Macs are less expensive than PCs to manage. In some categories such as troubleshooting, user training and help desk calls, three times as many administrators said that Macs cost less to manage.
The full survey enquired about buying plans, IT management and administration issues, and the cost of managing the systems. Related to the cost of managing Macs, the survey asked the respondents to estimate the relative cost of a number of factors including: software license fees, time troubleshooting, user training, help desk calls, system configuration, and supporting infrastructure (servers, network, and printers).
29% of the respondents cited lower total cost of ownership as one of the key reasons their organization buys Macs. Overall 45% cited lower total cost of ownership, ease of technical support, or both, as a significant factor in their Mac purchases.
"Administrators in organizations that have both Mac and PC platforms have the experience to determine whether managing Macs is less expensive," said T. Reid Lewis, CEO of Group Logic, and president of the Enterprise Desktop Alliance. "The members of the Enterprise Desktop Alliance provide products and services that make deployment and management of Macs easier to do."
Furthermore, the respondents were given the option to select from a range of cost differences. Not only did the administrators predominantly say that Macs were less expensive, in all but one category the majority of administrators who think Macs cost less asserted that they were more than 20% less expensive to manage than PCs. Of those who believe that PCs cost less, the majority always asserted that PCs were between 0 and 20% less expensive to manage than Macs.
Issues that matter to Administrators
The survey also explored the major issues for IT administrators in sites that had Macs. 81% said that parity in integration and management between Macs and PCs is important to their organization. In looking more closely at the issues of importance to the organizations, security and file sharing among systems emerged as the leading concerns.
Among the issues that ranked as “very” or “extremely” important to the 322 respondents were:
- File Sharing between Operating Systems 79%
- Security 79%
- Client management (inventory, patches, compliance) 72%
- Active Directory integration 66%
- Cross‐platform help desk and knowledge base support 60%
“Despite the uncertain economic conditions, Apple can expect the Mac to continue to find acceptance in large organizations,” said T. Reid Lewis. “More and more solutions are available to help these enterprises address their integration and management issues.”
