Apple Is Not Not Enterprise Ready
by
Can’t do a double negative? Go cry to your English teacher. This is an article on the bear knuckled fight for Enterprise dollars. How can Apple Macs and iPhones possibly work in the enterprise? They’re not enterprise ready. They have a lot of stuff that makes them individual and small business friendly, but they’re not enterprise ready! So, why are business users carrying iPhones and Macs? Don’t these people know there are enterprise systems out there that they should use?
Actually, despite the title, this is not really about Apple. It’s about the progression of technology from ‘useless’ to ‘as necessary as oxygen’ in the context of a business-oriented environments. Everybody is familiar with the adoption curve of new technology and phrases such as ‘early adopter.’ According to current thinking about technology adoption, as technology matures it moves into different phases and different target markets. Eventually it moves from twenty-somethings and teenagers in NYC that have to have the latest and greatest to your average fifty something in Kansas who has had the same TV and VCR for thirteen years.
Technology moves in a slightly different progression in business circles. A lot of it starts off as nothing more than a pass-time, an oddity or plaything. It then morphs and matures until it becomes the darling of the industry and trade press. If there’s anything I’ve learned is that the path from irrelevant to critical happens despite finding willing vendor or consultants pushing it as the next ‘big thing.’ The trade press can love it, hate it or ignore it and yet technology marches on. In many cases the technology moves forward despite the best efforts established vendors, consultants and trade press to marginalize it. We see it all the time – the often thorny path from toy to tool.
The experience most relevant to me is the web. When I started working in IT the infant web was already around, and according to an op/ed piece in the Washington Post was a place where computer geeks wrote about computers for other computer geeks. I worked for a company that had enterprise customers and put together enterprise solutions, based on enterprise technologies. The tools that comprised the ‘internet’ were not seen as a basis for building solutions for ‘enterprise’ clients. We had PowerBuilder, HP/UX, Oracle, VB, PL/SQL, Baan, etc., to build solutions. We were actually discouraged from using the web. Before I left they embraced the internet but were now railing against Linux (developers were supposed to share one very overcrowded HP Unix server).
I fought the same fight with Open Source anything, Java, PHP and MySQL. All these were, or are, not considered ‘enterprise’ by some magic board of managers that decide what enterprise is. (Gartner and their brethren are somewhat to blame). Macs and iPhones are derided as not being enterprise ready but they’re starting to move into the enterprise. At the same time solutions that should be taking the enterprise world by storm, because of their enterprise features, are languishing. I was once told no one would take the company I was working for seriously if it ‘got out’ that we were using tools like PHP instead of an enterprise product like ATG’s Dynamo.
So, here’s the IT cycle. Something is useful and popular. People bring it to work and it helps them do their job. Then, after creating the inevitable new technology dust up, it becomes mainstream. New technology goes through phases where its adoption is even clandestine, lest managers find out and people lose their jobs. Often that same technology becomes so pervasive that people wonder why they were so against it in the first place.
Right now it’s the agile language revolution. Java is enterprise. .NET is enterprise. But Ruby? Is Rails enterprise? How about Python? To make these tools acceptable to administrators, managers and IT governance type people, Jython, JRuby, Iron Python, etc. are the middle way. You are still a Java shop but you can use Jython for some things. In some cases people try to re-invent the enterprise toolkits and frameworks to be more Rails like or be more agile, yet leave them on the core language. Of course, it isn’t nearly as flexible or dynamic, or interesting as straight Ruby on Rails, or Django on Python.
It’s also the RESTful revolution. In many shops the standard is Web Services (in the WS- sense of the term). RESTful services seem not-enterprise enough. You can pluck out some feature of WS- (especially in the sickeningly complicated security area) where RESTful services doesn’t have a straightforward answer, and therefor must not be ‘enterprise ready.’ Except we’re seeing more and more companies eschew offerings based on WS-* and instead publish “API” documents that are based on RESTful methods. And then, to make it easier for implementers, releasing a library for a particular technology stack to ease integration so it doesn’t even matter.
The moral of the story is don’t pick a winner based on what trade press and IT governance groups think the winner ought to be. They look at promised features, product announcements from ‘enterprise’ vendors and white papers from large consulting companies. The Itanium was at one time going to take over the 64 bit server market according to the trade press. Several companies announced server offerings based on the Itanium that never materialized. IBM even stopped selling Itanium systems. Why? Because the lowly x86 made the transition from 32 to 64 bits and was more useful, cheaper and ultimately more popular. It wasn’t that long ago that people could barely take x86 based servers seriously outside of Windows servers.
Your criteria for adopting technologies should be that they are useful to you and your organization. You shouldn’t hop on every bandwagon. There are a lot of false starts. However, it seems like there are a lot more false starts among people hawking ‘enterprise tools’ than there are among people selling lowly, simple, easy to use and cheap technology. It reminds me of Japanese No drama. We all know how it’s going to turn out in the end, but we first all have to play our parts.
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