ANALYSIS
At Macworld, Apple Quietly Appeals to Enterprise

Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs kicked off Macworld Expo in San Francisco on Tuesday by announcing a full arsenal of products -- this as the company's stock soars to atmospheric levels, reaping the rewards of market dominance in digital music.

At first glance, Jobs' keynote speech seemed to focus on the now traditional Apple strongholds of digital entertainment that creative professionals and savvy consumers covet. Through a focus on Final Cut Pro Express HD, a new iLife, the new iWork productivity suite and the Mac mini, Apple's first sub-US$500 computer, it appeared the enterprise would see nothing new.

However, though the expo is not traditionally a forum for the enterprise, that does not mean 2005 will not bring new opportunities for businesses large and small to capitalize on these thrifty new product lines.

2004 Enterprise Reprise

For starters, existing solutions catering to data centers show the Cupertino, California, company is serious about big business. It was really last year that Apple began revealing its enterprise roadmap, targeting the newest trends in data centers everywhere: clustering and grid computing, storage management and cross-platform integration.

At mid-year at the Worldwide Developers Conference, the Mac maker peeled back the curtains on a look at Tiger, the next release of OS X, which comes fully loaded with comprehensive business tools for search, directory services, groupware messaging and more.

Just prior to this week's expo, Apple refreshed its Xserve line of rack-optimized servers, continuing to raise the bar on competitors in both cost per gigabyte for storage and in overall price.

Cisco's (Nasdaq: CSCO) recent adoption of the Xserve and OS X platform for a corporate storage solution is one of a string of high profile deployments of the Macintosh architecture that adds substantial credentials needed to further validate that Apple is serious about working with corporate America.

More Than a Consumer Strategy

Apple officials remain mum on an overall enterprise strategy and continue to ward off any attempts at insight into who makes up the internal teams closing these deals. However, corporations are made of more than servers.

Jupiter Research reported in 2004 that 14 percent of U.S. companies valued at $50 million or more had Macs within their user communities. If IT managers have the option to cut costs and provide modern hardware and software, the Xserve and OS X might find a foot in the door.

A major roadblock might be IT standardization, which is predominantly on an Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) platform. However, there will be obvious appeal in some corporate environments for the Mac mini as a desktop replacement for users not requiring a G5 or other premium workstation.

Apple has certainly sweetened the offer with industry standard ports allowing users to leverage existing USB keyboards and mice and traditionally Windows-based VGA monitors.

Office Tools

IWork's Pages word processor and page layout tool is expected to be Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Office-friendly (Keynote 2 already is), and one could assume a spreadsheet program to match Microsoft's Excel might be forthcoming from Apple during the year to round out the productivity suite. If so, corporate buyers might jump at the chance to save hundreds of dollars putting a desktop software solution on systems for users who don't need a full office suite implementation.

It's the Relationship

While technology budgets have been constricted during the last several years, that really does not push Apple out of the running. The company is one of the most aggressive in pricing from operating system licensing to large scale storage area networks.

Where the problem might lie is in the ability to build and communicate a clear vision and roadmap for future development and product refreshes, something Apple avoids like the plague in most cases. Just about everyone will agree they are leaders in innovation and have a good friend in IBM (NYSE: IBM).

Nailing down corporate purchasing budgets will in large part require showing a longterm commitment to building for enterprises large and small. Doing that will require Jobs and Co. to pull back the shroud and reveal more than a six-month view into the firm's plans.