Apple Partners With Cisco To Boost Enterprise Business 90
An anonymous reader writes: Apple and Cisco announced a partnership aimed at helping Apple's devices work better for businesses. Cisco will provide services specially optimized for iOS devices across mobile, cloud, and on premises-based collaboration tools such as Cisco Spark, Cisco Telepresence and Cisco WebEx, the companies said in a statement. "What makes this new partnership unique is that our engineering teams are innovating together to build joint solutions that our sales teams and partners will take jointly to our customers," Cisco Chief Executive Chuck Robbins said in a blog post.
Making Some Changes to This Story (Score:3, Funny)
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Crisco? :P
Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Cisco Engineers massively prefer Macs over PCs to the point that those that use anything other than Macs are rare. By improving their products on Macs, they are helping their employees even before any clients are considered.
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I worked at a place once where whole floors of the QA building had Sparc Workstations. I guess we know why Sun failed on the desktop, now.
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I guess we know why Sun failed on the desktop, now.
SGI took over the desktop?
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Huh? I also worked at Sun. In our division, 90% or more of us used Linux.
You're the few. Even the Solaris team used Macs running Solaris x86.
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macs at sun? when was that?
I was at sun right before oracle killed them and in engineering, it was all tower sun workstations. sunblade this and netra that (for those doing netra work).
and at sgi, we had o2's and octanes.
at DEC, we had decstations and vaxstations.
I liked it when there was computer diversity like that. I really do miss using real unix boxes instead of (sigh) windows windows windows! in the corp world, you only get to pick win or apple, now.
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macs at sun? when was that?
Right after Apple switched from PPC to Intel. There was so much demand for Mac laptops that IT spun up a program to provide them internally.
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what is big o
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Bullshit, then why does cisco employees hate Macs so much that their employees constantly spit at people that have them? I live not far from their headquarters in San Jose, and their employees hate me and my family for using MacBooks. They hate us. One of them screamed at my daughter and made her cry recently. They hate us. I have never seen one of their kind with an Apple product. You can just tell their employees by the eyes. They always have such cruel eyes, like a Republican.
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Those system admins are incompetent. There is plenty of documentation for both support and development related activities, including training and certification. You can find all the training documentation for IT certification on Apple's website.
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The sysadmins I know who administer cisco shops hate 'em because of limited to no technical/administrative documentation for the OS. This makes it difficult to integrate them into enterprise environments. This comes from apple's walled garden ignorance standpoint, where the answer is to buy into more of their ecosystem so it 'just works.' Corporates are not going to do this.
Obviously an anecdote, as I assume your statement is.
Your "sysadmins" need to learn to read. I found this "front door" Business/Educational Deployment Support page [apple.com] in two minutes of searching on Apple's website, with no idea where to start looking.
And having tried to find (most times without success) ANY information in the morass that is Microsoft's "technical documentation", and the NON-EXISTENT Linux Technical Documentation (man pages don't count, and BTW, OS X has them, too), I MUCH prefer Apple's "Library-like" approach. Most of the time, I can find the
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Considering we just had Cisco LIVE! San Diego, I'll call bullshit on this as well. The number of Dell, Lenovo and other laptops/tablets was conservatively equal to or optimistically greater to Macs for several reasons:
First and foremost: Most companies do not include Mac's in their company approved machine acquisition list.
Second: They are STILL not natively compatible with a lot of software without running Fusion or similar.
I will admit that they are popular machines, but I digress in stating they are not
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The San Francisco based "Cisco-ians" all use MacBooks for sure, but as I said, there were just as many official Cisco employees using Dell laptops to host sessions. I actually asked someone this morning why Cisco has a love for Apple and their response actually doesn't surprise me now that I know:
"Because they (Apple) have a non-compete with us and they make good hardware, duh! Unlike, say Dell w/ NetGear & HP with 3Com/ProCurve, Apple doesn't make switches and routers that compete with our product line
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When a group of 2 desktop engineers can manage 1000+ Apple computers (update and tweak trivial things, install and manage packages, patches, new software, functionality, manage encryption and removable drive access, tweaks etc) around the world from their desk, Apple will take over in the enterprise. Until then, it will be people using their Apple with Citrix or some other method to access a corporate virtual desktop or a sandboxed app delivery system remotely running.
You're in luck! That day is Today! (or actually, about a decade or so ago).
ARD (Apple Remote Desktop) is a SPECTACULAR way to manage a group of Macs [apple.com]. I think it actually started more as a way to monitor/manage classrooms-full of Macs (in fact, they used to have a view (maybe still do) in the ARD Management Console that shows a real-time view of however-many Macs you want at a time, and you can "zoom in" on one to do stuff/chat with its User. Think the old-skool "Language Labs", where the teacher could mon
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That's been around for years, it is MAINLY for remote support and what limited functionality it can do with software packages and changing, locking down, and management settings is very minimal. No doubt it works great in a small environment like a classroom or maybe even a small campus where support is the main goal but it is no comparison to what is available in the world for managing Windows machines.
When you are part of a team of 2 that manages (not talking about tier 1 and 2 support when users have problems) 1000 desktops and laptops around the world, let me know which methods you think are better. Try seamlessly moving the location of their network synchronized home directory to another storage/network location for practice
I mentioned that it had been around for years; but I don't agree with one other word of your post.
It is precisely designed to admin huge numbers of Macs, as well as Windows and Linux machines, anywhere they can be reached, including over the internet. It even includes switchable AES encryption for network traffic; so even if a VPN is not available, you can safely admin remote systems. That's a far cry from your assertions.
Also, far from your claims that ARD is mainly for "remote support" (which is actua
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I think this will neatly belie the allegation that ARD is some sort of lightweight Remote Admin tool with "limited functionality".
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Cisco Engineers massively prefer Macs over PCs to the point that those that use anything other than Macs are rare. By improving their products on Macs, they are helping their employees even before any clients are considered.
I have no idea where you got this idea from. The vast majority of Cisco engineers that I know use Windows PCs for the simple reason that there is a much wider array of network analysis, management, and utilities for Windows. Not to mention drivers. Most of us are more interested in designing, configuring, and troubleshooting our networks and don't have time to mess around with UNIX drivers, etc. just to get a network tool to work.
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"I am a cisco employee"... Because "Anonymous Coward" would never lie, right?
Further, even if you were "a cisco employee", you would most likely have been at Cisco Live! San Diego in July and guess what? For all the black and white fedora wearing network nerds that were there, they were not all using "Macbooks" there, not even close. Heck, even Mike Rowe was sporting a Dell laptop the night of the Aerosmith concert outside the gate at the VIP entrance!
To further down your comment: Cisco isn't the end-all-be
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As I said elsewhere in this thread, I'm a Cisco partner & work regularly with their engineers & people sent from the US for workshops here in Paris. The users of non-Apple hardware are rare enough to be remarkable. As for your uniformed opinion that we don't have the tools on OS X to do our jobs, lets chalk that up to your ignorance of just what tools are available and an assumption on your part that if it isn't the same tool as under windows then it doesn't exist.
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I was at cisco during the last year and, yes, it was amazing how many silver aluminum laptops I saw 'walking around'. 100:1 or 50:1 to pc's.
while there, I took some employee training and one class was almost entirely international exchange students (there for a whole year at a time, I'm told). 99% of them had apple laptops.
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Everyone in my experience that uses Macs at Cisco also uses OSX as rMBPs are the most popular model used and only OSX has stable support for hot plugging thunderport devices. The people who prefer Linux/Windows use Dell/HPs. That said, everyone uses VMware so if they need Linux/windows its there too.
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but why should anyone have to pay more extra for Apple products?
Because there is actually a real difference between price and value. Something that is sadly misunderstood among some of the Slashdot crowd.
Apple givin-away-givin-away (Score:1)
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It's a rough news day. This press release is another meaningless Apple Tries To Wear A Suit And Tie tome. Coming just behind the "Oh Gosh I loved Windows 95", post, it must be another dozer week-before-a-US-Federal-Holiday Monday.
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This press release is another meaningless Apple Tries To Wear A Suit And Tie tome.
I don't know how long, or how closely, you have been following Apple news. But to those who have been watching, this is one of the extremely rare times you will find an "Apple in business"-type story. In fact, if you wanted solid proof that Steve Jobs has left the building, this is it.
Under Jobs, Apple blatantly ignored the business-end of its business. Witness the fact that Jobs basically starved the Server version of OS X, and the hardware to run it on, until the hardware was killed-off outright, and OS
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This release is a bag of foam and goo. It's for the PR, and maybe the stocks of both won't slide any more than they have.
Apple risks plenty, as does Cisco, by implementing still more proprietary protocols--- and the details if you'll notice, are scant.
Apple's relationship is fanatically tied to its users. Users count. It's all about the users. The genuinely laughable business response is to take orders. That's it. Apple's Xserve and Xsan, nice as they might have been, are now filling dump sites across the w
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In the long run you have a totally better situation with Linux over Apple.
Until you want support. Then its RHEL or ???
And RHEL sort of defeats the whole idea of Linux as a F/OSS OS, doesn't it?
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Hey Apple if you want enterprise business (Score:4, Insightful)
How about, well, learning to support an enterprise? Stop treating every device like it is a consumer toy. Offer some real management tools, don't require an Apple account to do everything on your computers, etc, etc, etc.
It always amuses me when I see Apple talk about the enterprise space because they have done such a shit job supporting OS-X for the enterprise for so long. You can make it work, of course, and there are plenty of 3rd party tools, many very expensive, to help but it is all your own doing. Apple themselves seem to view each device as an island, property of a single consumer to be used as a toy and thrown away when the next shiny toy comes along.
Of course what they really mean here is "We want big businesses to buy our stuff, but we don't want to actually go through the trouble of supporting them."
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Offer some real management tools, don't require an Apple account to do everything on your computers, etc, etc, etc.
Or honestly, you know, just... fix the broken crap. Take all the stuff that Apple does offer for business, and fix the bugs.
Like take care of the bugs in Mail that cause it to not sync properly when mailboxes hit a certain size. Fix the bugs with Open Directory, Profile Manager, and mobile user account syncing. Speed up access to file servers, and fix the SMB problems that cause files to become locked and Finder to crash. Some of these problems have existed for years, and they're just not getting fixed
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You forget that they have already seriously burned their customers by dropping the ball the way they did with the Apple Xserve and Xserve RAID... A good example of this is "The Tennis Channel" in Los Angeles. They bought millions of dollars worth of Xserve RAID and got severely burned on them when their promised "dual redundant" Xserve RAID's started failing left and right, without any recourse for recovery. I was working for a VAR when that went down and I can tell you that a number of customers would neve
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What is frustrating now, though, is while they have (probably sensibly) stopped pretending to make server grade hardware, they still won't 'bless' one of the commonly used hyper visors to run OSX for any price.
Actually, they have; they're just REALLY quiet about it.
There is ONE (and only one) version of OS X that is licensed for virtualization, and it just so happens to be OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) SERVER. In fact, they still offer a Retail version of that on DVD for $19. You just have to call Apple Support and know what to ask for; but I know someone who has ordered it as recent as a few months ago, and it is still listed with their Customer Service persons an an Active, Order-able part.
The Apple Part Numbe
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Actually, they have; they're just REALLY quiet about it. There is ONE (and only one) version of OS X that is licensed for virtualization, and it just so happens to be OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) SERVER. In fact, they still offer a Retail version of that on DVD for $19. You just have to call Apple Support and know what to ask for; but I know someone who has ordered it as recent as a few months ago, and it is still listed with their Customer Service persons an an Active, Order-able part. The Apple Part Number for this magic is: MC588Z/A . Call 800.692.7753 and tell them you want to order that Part. $19.99 and its all yours. And legal.
Sorry but you're wrong there isn't just one verison of OS X that's licensed for virtualization, read Apple's SLA docs for OS X & OS X Server http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/
OS X Snow Leopard Server is allowed to run as a VM on Apple hardware as long as you have a license for each VM. It doesn't actually state virtualization however. From the Snow Leopard SLA "You may also install and use other copies of Mac OS X Server Software on the same Apple-branded computer, provided that you acquire an individ
I wish they'd just fuck off with the enterprise (Score:2)
I would be perfectly happy if they just said "Know what? OS-X is a home user OS. We don't support the enterprise. We are going to remove support for these enterprise features with the next version. Use something else." That would be great because then I could tell all the Macheads to suck it up and use Windows or Linux.
However Apple likes to play at enterprise support, they've played at it for years. They act like they care, but as you note they half-ass it to the extreme.
Even internally. I remember not lon
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Apple will not be able to achieve proper support in the enterprise world... Enterprise/Federal customers didn't want a relationship with a "product", which is what Apple makes their money on. Enterprise/Federal customers want a relationship with a company, and they were willing to pay for that. On call, 24/7. I just don't see Apple doing that, ever.
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The problem was that the prophet Steve (peace be upon him) hated the business market for some obscure personal reason and did everything he could to keep the company out of it. Now that Apple has fallen into secular hands, a revival of interest in the enterprise market may be in the works.
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They don't want it. Why would they? They are a consumer electronics company.
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It always amuses me when I see Apple talk about the enterprise space because they have done such a shit job supporting OS-X for the enterprise for so long. You can make it work, of course, and there are plenty of 3rd party tools, many very expensive, to help but it is all your own doing. Apple themselves seem to view each device as an island, property of a single consumer to be used as a toy and thrown away when the next shiny toy comes along.
Then explain, for example, THIS [apple.com] and THIS [apple.com] (the latter having existed for well over a decade, and which can not only be used to admin however many Macs you can throw at it; but also Windows and Linux systems). Oh, and the Administraton Console for ARD (Apple Remote Desktop) costs a whopping $69. The Client-side is free. Hardly "expensive".
So, the only reason your think there isn't any "corporate" support for Apple systems/devices is because you haven't bothered to look for the two minutes it took to find th
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Of course what they really mean here is "We want big businesses to buy our stuff, but we don't want to actually go through the trouble of supporting them."
That strategy has worked really well for Dell...
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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You have to have an above-average level of Apple-hate to latch on to that particular wrinkle in your panties.
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I worked on IOS for 12 years and iOS for the last 3 years. :)
Head hunters love me. T
They skim my Linkedin profile, failing to read the details, and get into a frenzy thinking I've been writing Apps for iPhone since 1994.
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Why? (Score:2)
These devices don't belong on an enterprise network anyway. They're allowed on a guest network and that's it.
Who in their right mind is going to allow these personal devices on a company network? Haven't we seen enough bad things happen with stuff like this?
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Funny, you seem to think that products can only be bought for personal use.
What, I wonder, do you think this deal is designed to address? Perhaps it has something to do with wanting to make iOS devices more enterprise-friendly (they already have rudimentary enterprise support with curated app stores and local app deployment, but you think this chicken and egg problem shouldn't be solved because they're "consumer devices".
Whoever would buy an automobile! The roads are designed for horses and carts! There are
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Unless Apple comes up with some real give away hardware deals. They will never gain much in enterprise as a whole.
Since a lot of companies now have BYOD programs, Apple doesn't have to suck corporate cock like Dell and HP do. The employees like their Apple products so much THEY pay for them out of their OWN pockets.
This is where I don't see Microsoft doing enough, but I still do not see enterprise leaving Windows for OS X or IOS in droves.
Actually, it's much more quiet than that. More like a steady drip. But just like those steady drips that you see on nature-based TV shows, when enough time goes by, you look up and that little drip has carved a thousand-foot canyon. Except in this case, the canyon is only going to take about a decade, and it
None of that is Apple's Enterprise Problem (Score:3)
Most people who work in enterprises don't work in IT so they don't care about admin tools etc. Most people work in marketing, sales, accounting, finance, logistics or manufacturing and all the software for all those departments runs on Windows. Middle market accounting software for Mac? Does not exist. Manufacturing/inventory control software for Mac? Nope. Contractor estimating/job costing? You get the picture.
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Right, but who said anything about changing that? They just want to make iOS devices work more effectively in an enterprise setting - that means tablets, phones etc.
There's no reason that iPads (for example) couldn't be used as handy video conference devices, especially at remote/off-site/smaller sites alongside all the current IT infrastructure.
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Yeah, you know what would be really nice? If Apple wrote some good apps for other operating systems.
Licensing 3rd party software for AirPlay and AirPrint services in a Windows network is stupid and on top of that it doesn't work all that well.
Microsoft makes really good apps for Apple products, it would be awfully nice if Apple returned the favor.
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ducks!
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So Apple is a software company now?
Also, what do you think this partnership is, exactly, if not to improve third-party iOS integration?
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Most people who work in enterprises don't work in IT so they don't care about admin tools etc. Most people work in marketing, sales, accounting, finance, logistics or manufacturing and all the software for all those departments runs on Windows. Middle market accounting software for Mac? Does not exist. Manufacturing/inventory control software for Mac? Nope. Contractor estimating/job costing? You get the picture.
ORLY?
Twenty years ago, that was definitely the case. Not anymore. Here are but a few examples:
Productivity/Project Management [omnigroup.com] BTW, this has been around for many years.
Contact Management/Planning/Marketing [marketcircle.com]
Accounting [accountedge.com] (also has been around for DECADES)
Manufacturing/Inventory Control/ERP [xtuple.com] (VERY Robust, been around for years. Cross-Platform, Semi-Open Source) I write ERP software for a living, and this is GOOD stuff!!!
Job Costing [softwareadvice.com]. XTuple does that, too; but here is but one example: A highly-rated Job Cos
Enterprise Business? *GUFFAW* APPLE? (Score:2)
Hold on. Is it April first? Because that's GOT to be a joke.
Apple doesn't want, and cannot handle enterprise business.
Because enterprise customers, spending millions, aren't as forgiving of Apple's little "oopsies" the way their fanboy userbase is.
And having technicians constantly going "Well try this piece of software and see if it does what you want" would get old quickly.
The Mac developer base couldn't support it (bless their eclectic little hearts...)
Now the elephant in the room. Apple's inherent und