INDUSTRY ANALYSIS
Enterprise Vendors' Mac Push: Opportunity or Opportunism?

In conjunction with Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), several enterprise vendors this week announced expanded or new certifications and support for Apple's Safari Web browser and Unix-based OS X platform, including NetSuite, Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) and PeopleSoft.

These announcements followed Apple's sale of 1,566 Xserves for a supercomputer cluster to COLSA to be used in military research, and the release of more enterprise-friendly Apple Remote Desktop 2.

Yankee Group senior analyst Michael Dominy told MacNewsWorld a big part of these moves is name recognition by way of Apple's recent surge in press coverage.

"Associating yourselves with Apple does positive things for your brand," he said. "Apple certainly has a strong brand regardless of market share."

CRM for Mac Users

On Wednesday, NetSuite and PeopleSoft, both purveyors of customer-relationship management (CRM) and enterprise-resource planning (ERP) tools, announced certifications for Safari within their product lines.

IDC analyst Scott Tiazkun did not necessarily see this as a big deal ; however, he said that both firms made a smart move by extending this support for OS X.

"Enterprise players want to look at all aspects of the market, including small and medium sectors," Tiazkun said in a MacNewsWorld interview. "They could also gain stronger footholds in academia considering Apple's strength in those areas."

According to Dominy, PeopleSoft and NetSuite rarely go head to head for business, operating at opposite ends of the market spectrum.

"That is not to say there are not instances where compatibility would help," Dominy explained. "Companies might have remote sites that could leverage NetSuite's products to access PeopleSoft data instead of deploying an enterprise application, where it would be too costly."

Oracle, Java and the Grid

Last May Oracle announced plans to bring its 10g database platform to OS X during the second half of this year. On Wednesday, at both the WWDC and the JavaOne Conference, the company revealed plans to release JDeveloper for 10.

JDeveloper 10g for Mac will provide expanded capability for Java J2EE and Web services developers using OS X. These moves also enable Apple to offer customers a proven scalable enterprise-class database platform.

David Freund, practice leader of information architecture at Illuminata, said in an earlier interview with MacNewsWorld that Oracle does not move into any market space without considerable opportunity.

Freund said he believes this is significant for Apple. "This further justifies their gear as [being] suitable for the enterprise," he noted.

For his part, Tiazkun said Oracle's move will also benefit smaller vendors who thrive off of products from Oracle, and for that matter, PeopleSoft. At the same time, Tiazkun doubts this is costing Oracle a lot of money in porting to Apple.

"They are Unix-based already," Tiazkun added. "If they do increase market share from it, their gamble pays off. Nothing ventured, nothing gained."

Obscuring Other Issues

For his part, Dominy said this may also be a timing effort to distract industry watchers from events that could generate less-than-positive press. Dominy's comment alluded to the Department of Justice's antitrust case against Oracle's hostile bid for PeopleSoft, which PeopleSoft is also entangled in from a public-relations perspective.

"It is no surprise that press releases start flying around industry conferences and legal proceeding," he pointed out. "Big vendors like these need to have positive marketing and PR material in view constantly."

Tiazkun said that the moves are part of a constant need for vendors to make PR noise in the marketplace.

"I don't see this as a large market share move, at least not yet," Tiazkun explained. "As far as timing, these companies all know what the others are doing like it or not. They have to stay competitive."