"The strong part of Apple traditionally hasn't been in the corporate IT server farm," Tony Adams, principal analyst in the IT services group at Gartner Dataquest, told NewsFactor.

Yet Clear Channel Worldwide, an advertising, broadcasting and entertainment behemoth, plans to add 40 new Xserves before year's end. Major partners also have pledged that their products will run on the Xserve, including Sybase, whose enterprise database application is already available for Xserve in a commercial release, and Oracle, whose competing product is in developer release.

Although Apple has not made sales figures available for the Xserve's first quarter of existence, initial orders for the yet-untested product topped 4,000, and many expect first-quarter sales to be robust.

So, what might make an enterprise "switch," to use Apple's parlance?

Negative into Positive

Gartner analyst Adams said a strong selling point is the tightly coupled integration between the Xserve's OS and its hardware platform.

Ironically, Apple was roundly criticized in the past for declining to license its OS to other hardware vendors. However, this longstanding strategy may prove to benefit the company in the server sphere.

"There are very few platforms where the operating system and the hardware are created in one organization," Adams said. "With the conjoinment of [its] operating system and hardware, we see a much more complete form of support and service because there's a single point of accountability."

OS with a Bullet

Ben Toker, vice president of operations at Scitx, which offers Web hosting services and products for businesses, told NewsFactor that Apple's OS X Server software was a primary reason for his company's decision to convert to the Xserve.

"OS X is based on FreeBSD, which we used to use," Toker said. "Apple added a GUI interface, making it very easy to use."

Scitx tested applications designed both internally and by its partners to determine how they worked with Apple's new OS and got a good response, he added.

According to Adams, FreeBSD is an open source version of Unix that serves as a basis for many of today's commercial Unix products. Apple's decision to base its operating system on FreeBSD gives IT administrators good flexibility in using and maintaining the system.

And integration hurdles appear negligible. Tom Goguin, manager of server software products at Apple, told NewsFactor that the Xserve contains a lot of technology to support mixed workgroups of a variety of types. For example, support for AFP (Apple File Protocol), NFS (Network File System, a Unix file protocol) and SMB/SIPS (Server Message Block/Common Internet File System, used for Windows machines), among other protocols, is built into the OS X Server platform. (continued...)

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