Alliance Formed to Support Companies Making the Switch to Mac

Sources are reporting that five companies, all of which already produce "switch-to-Mac" solutions, have founded the Enterprise Desktop Alliance. EDA hopes to convince the deployment of Macs in the enterprise, validating and promoting the availability of solutions that make it easy to do so.

Centrify, LANrev, Atempo, GroupLogic and Parallels are the companies in question. The latter, as most Mac users should know, is a worldwide leader in virtualization and automation software. The company was founded in 1999 and has employees in North America, Europe and Asia. Its software optimizes computing for consumers, businesses and service providers across all major hardware, operating systems (including Apple's Mac OS X) and virtualization platforms.

EDA's aim is to find the solutions best fitted to deploy, integrate and manage Macs using Windows-based solutions, since most companies out there are still using Windows but need a more reliable and a more secure computing environment as well. Therefore the alliance hopes to integrate Macs slowly, but steadily to achieve these results with little effort from the actual companies making the switch.

"Interest in the Mac at large organizations is growing along with Apple's market share," said Bob O'Donnell, Vice President, IDC. "The challenge has been overcoming objections surrounding managing Macs within these corporate environments. Efforts that can make life easier for the IT professional and help the Mac become a more appealing and realistic alternative within the enterprise could help turn that interest into a stronger Mac presence."

Peter Frankl, Founder and Chief Operating Officer of LANrev, also notes that "the popularity of the Mac among corporate end-users does not mean that there have to be headaches for IT administrators." He added: "We are determined to help companies integrate Macs into their enterprise environments by reducing total cost of ownership and increasing IT acceptance of Macs in the enterprise."

You can have a closer look at EDA's plans here.