Thoughts on enterprise mac software during a recent California visit
Last week I visited Zimbra, dropped by a prospective customer on the way to the Apple Campus, and later took one of my brothers out for dinner.
Flying into San Francisco from Chicago first thing in the cold, dark morning, I drove a bright red Hyundai rental 15 minutes away to the Zimbra headquarters in San Mateo. During the drive, pulled-over twice to answer my cell and speak with customers, so arrived about 20 minutes later than expected. Lucky for me the Zimbra kitchen is well-stocked with snacks and every conceivable caffeinated beverage (thanks, Jamie)! It’s the kind of snack emporium about which as a college student, and for sometime thereafter, I dreamed. [Insert choral crescendo and harps here.]
Between bites of beef jerky, had just enough time to be introduced to the team there prior to driving over to Palo Alto to meet with a prospective customer. Zimbra’s office is the buzzing hive of activity you’d expect at an intense, software-driven, industry-leading tech company.
For those of you not yet familiar with Zimbra, a more affordable alternative to Microsoft’s Exchange, it’s a collaboration suite for Mac OS X that delivers e-mail, calendar and contact sharing, along with synchronization to Mac Mail, iCal, AddressBook and Entourage, as well as to Outlook 2003 and popular PDAs such as the Treo. As background, among other Mac-focused services, my team at OnDeckTech sells licenses for the software to companies, helps them plan, install, maintain and upgrade Zimbra servers, primarily on Mac OS X, and also on Red Hat Linux, and also provide a hosted services option.
Down the road in Palo Alto, the sales meeting lasted a few hours, during which we demonstrated Zimbra and discussed various migration and integration strategies from and with their current, Sun-based system. We finished and jumped on the road, driving to Cupertino. The road trip sponsored ruminations about the company…
It’s been said Apple is a hardware company. As such, there are hundreds of Apple salespeople and Apple hardware resellers searching for new ways to sell Apple computers to businesses around the world. Software and services include products such as Zimbra, enabling people selling Apple computers to return to their customers and say something like, “we have a credible solution for replacing your existing Microsoft Exchange server, that in fact will give you certain additional benefits at materially less cost. Of course you will need at least one additional Xserve to support it, with which I’m happy to help you.” And the beat goes on!
When we talk about enterprise and Apple technology, for the most part we’re talking about server solutions. Of the 30K applications that run on OS X, just about all can run on OS X Server, so what, exactly differentiates “server” software? For the most part, it seems like Server means “client-server”, that is, a piece of software that resides on a computer and provides services over a network to other computers. Besides the built in server software of OS X Server, examples include the databases Filemaker and Oracle , Zimbra and network disk imaging suite Casper . Ah Casper! making large numbers of computers more manageable for small numbers of systems administrators, network disk imaging makes exact duplicates of an entire hard drive, and “casts” them across a network to receptive computers. Casper (yes, like Ghost) takes that process a step further, and customizes each cast based on factors such as the computer’s user, network address, preferences, and software licensing. Someone recently said to me, “it’s like Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) on steroids.” Yes, and in full roid rage! Watch the JAMF Software home page for a juicy product release this month.
With the Xserve RAID now packing up to 7 TB, and the Xserve up to 1.5TB, most technology people seem enthused about the new Apple server hardware, especially the Xserve’s dual-power supplies and lights-out management enabling systems administration even when the operating system is unavailable. This new equipment is better designed than ever, a number of people have mentioned the positive review of its design in InfoWeek (although the title does not seem positive). “The ecosystem that supports server solutions is very healthy,” said one anonymous source (not my brother), with whom I had a lengthy discussion about the new Battlestar Galactica (he does not think Baltar is a Cylon).
When I got to Cupertino, my brother came down and we went out to dinner at Sushi-O-Sushi , per suggestion from said anonymous source, and it was excellent, especially the Crumbled Spider. Besides my wife and kids, we talked about our other, younger brother, who’s in D.C. doing a political internship, and my sister’s first year of college at Bates where she’s doing a great job playing field hockey. My brother had burned his fingers that morning, and we guessed that when he told dad about it, dad would dredge up his story about burning his hand in oil when he was working as a butcher in Cleveland like 50 years ago. Later that week, dad delivered!
Got a chance to see my brother’s new place (first place!), very nice bachelor pad, his turn-tables in the living room, across from a park complete with skateboard park, crashed there thankfully after sharing some unfiltered sake. Up at 4AM to head back to Chicago, didn’t even wake the cat.
