Thinking A Little Different

A year from now, I imagine that I'll look back and laugh at the fact that my first Server Pipeline editor's note was about...Apple. Partly about them, anyway. After all, it is Macworld week, and although all the noise out of San Francisco is about the increasingly ubiquitous iPod and new generations of Macs, Apple has also devoted some effort to pushing its Xserve G5 upgrade, as well as its Xsan storage system. Wonder of wonders, it's even devoted a website to IT professionals. Now there's some thinking differently.

Trouble is, Apple isn't thinking quite differently enough. It's likely to have the same issues with Xserve that it's always had getting into IT shops--pricey hardware. All the unlimited client license hookups that come with a Mac OS X Server deployment when you buy Xserve G5s won't mitigate the fact that you can go a lot more cheaply by deploying commodity servers running open-source or, for bigger shops, a price-competitive deal from the likes of IBM or Hewlett-Packard. With those behemoths emphasizing their server lines this year, Apple will have to market like crazy to play in the enterprise market. It has a good base to work from; Mac OS X Server is plenty stable and the company's overall server system, typically elegant and user-friendly (not to mention cool--in the temperature sense, that is), makes rollouts easy for IT managers. But those managers and their CIO bosses are looking at their budgets, too.

And it could be that North America isn't even the market to be concentrating on. News that Red Flag, China's leading Linux developer, has joined the Open Source Development Labs consortium ought to be refocusing attention on the fact that China's server market, heavily open-source-dependent, is poised to explode over the next five years. A Chinese market researcher pegs the expected growth rate at 50 percent compounded annually. That's a lot of server boxes, folks.