Apple V.P. of Enterprise Sales is leaving - what's the strategy?

Re: Al Shipp, Apple's former Sr. V.P. of Enterprise Sales at Apple is leaving

What he said : http://www.macobserver.com/columns/hiddendimensions/2008/11/11.1.shtml

My take
This is one of the clearest explanations of Apple's approach to sales in general, not just the enterprise. Apple's clearly stated goal is to build the best possible products and that these products will sell based on their merits and applicability to a given customer, be they in the enterprise, a school or a home.

I think that Apple's current product line-up is exceedingly well adapted to many enterprises if they would stop and take the time to properly evaluate them. And it's only going to get better.

OS X Server has been evolving at least as rapidly as the desktop environment and offers a very good value many companies. There are a number of key features that will change the attractiveness of OS X Server for many Microsoft based companies, some are here today, and others are under development.

Active Directory Integration
Just like the desktop, OS X Server can be directly integrated into an Active Directory, but this integration goes even further, offering a Centrify-like ability to take any server application and base the authentication and authorization on Active Directory. This means that you can offer a standard compliant IMAP and SMTP server combination using your Active Directory accounts. No additional account management or synchronization required. Out of the box in the same amount of time that it takes you to join a workstation to an Active Directoryu domain. Oh - and without the reboot.

Mail and Calendaring
Today, the missing piece is the level of integration with the Outlook client on the Windows desktop, but there are few things that have changed recently: Apple has licenced the ActiveSync protocol for the iPhone and Exchange/Mail.app integration is promised in the Snow Leopard release. On the server side, the Snow Leopard Server mail and calendaring services described look an awful lot like the Exchange feature set.

Full Outlook client compatibility hasn't been announced by Apple, but it's a relatively small step to be able to offer the Exchange experience with these functions in the server. Either by using the ActiveSync protocol from the server side (I wonder if the license they have from Microsoft permits this) or by developing an Outlook plugin. Wouldn't that be the same thing that was developed for MobileMe and Outlook synchronization?

Collaboration
The first generation blog server included in Tiger was a bit of a hack based on the Blojsom project and worked pretty well as a blog server, but was complicated if you wanted to extend its capabilities. The Leopard release included a total rewrite of a general purpose collaboration platform that included both wiki and blog services. What's really important here is that the platform is entirely extensible using javascript and will be positioned in Snow Leopard as a viable alternative to Sharepoint. I've only just started looking at what you can do here and even in the current version, the options are astouding and I just wish I had more time to delve into the possibilities.

Going forward
Apple's goal is to build the best possible products and OS X Server is going to be even more attractive to enterprises going forward in difficult economic times. OS X Server unlimited version goes for $999 USD with no after sales gotchas, client access licences (CALs in Microsoft speak) or additional products like a database server. Again, Apple's goal is to win by building the best products and it's marketing that will bring people to take a look - pure sales has only limited value to Apple's market development.

The economic argument
For a quick example, I'm going to take a small company of 50 people to see what my Microsoft solution will cost for messaging and collaboration services. Of course, making this viable does depend on Apple stepping up to the plate and delivering with Snow Leopard Server. But even without 100% transparency, the relative value equation is still pretty impressive.

OS X Server vs Sharepoint (source)

	Apple	Microsoft
Server platform	OS X Server: $999	Windows Server 2008 Standard: $999
Collaboration platform	included	Office SharePoint Server 2007: $4,424
User licences	included	Office SharePoint Server 2007 Standard CAL $94*50=$4,700
IDE, development tools	included	Office SharePoint Designer 2007: $187
Database engine	included	SQL Server 2005, Workgroup Edition $3,899/processor = $7,798
Totals	$999	$18,108

I've only chosen the entry level versions, even though the Snow Leopard collaboration services offer deep search capabilities that require
more expensive versions for Sharepoint and you have no additional costs for putting up your server on an internet facing connection.
A dual processor server seems the minimum reasonable investment today.

OS X Server vs Exchange (source)
Now this is a more complicated question in the enterprise, since in larger environments the messaging infrastructure can be quite complicated, and Exchange does have a serious edge here in being able to manage user accounts distributed across multiple servers and stuff like that. But for the fledgling enterprise, a single server is more than capable of handling the task up to about 2000 user accounts per server on Exchange. There are of course additional complexities to look into like the fact that you will require a separate mail relay or proxy for handling incoming mail since you can't filter on the server that handles the mailboxes, but I'll assume you do this on the cheap with a Linux box rather that a second Exchange server.

	Apple	Microsoft
Server Platform	OS X Server: $999	Windows Server 2008 Standard: $999
Messaging Server	included	Microsoft Exchange Standard: $699
User licences	included	Microsoft Exchange Standard CAL $67*50=$3,350
Totals	$999	$5,048

I've heard a lot people argue that they don't want to use OS X Server since they don't have access to people that know how to run it. But given the price differences, you can easily afford to train your administrators from the savings and still have money left over.

Waiting for Snow Leopard
The decision points for the enterprise purchase will depend greatly on the eventual extensibility of the collaboration services and the level of integration with Outlook. But it seems that Apple has a very well developed product strategy for offering value to the enterprise, not just a sales strategy...