Macs reach 23% share in US enterprises, IDC confirms

Apple is experiencing astonishing Mac market growth in the US enterprise markets, according to IDC, where it has seen macOS device use increase around a third since 2019.

Macs ‘growing by many measures’

“The adoption of Mac usage in the enterprise (1,000+ employees) is growing by many measures,” IDC said, according to a Jamf announcement. “In the United States, average penetration of macOS devices is around 23%, compared with 17% in 2019.”

The analyst firm also took a measure of how Apple’s other products are performing in the enterprise, saying: “Macs, of course, are not the entire story around Apple devices in the enterprise. According to IDC’s 2020 enterprise survey, iPhones account for 49% of the smartphone installed base among U.S. enterprises, and iPads account for the majority of tablets used in business.

“The proliferation of Apple devices — macOS devices, as well as iPhones, iPads, and Apple TV — in business is causing many organizations to rethink their approach to overall endpoint provisioning, management, and security.”

Living at the edge

Driven by remote working in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to provide effective tools to provision, manage and secure Apple devices means enterprises are searching for solutions, such as those from Jamf.

This has generated interest from IDC, which has named Jamf a leader in its first ever Worldwide Unified Endpoint Management Software for Apple Devices 2021 Vendor Assessment.

Full access to the IDC report costs $15,000, but Phil Hochmuth, program vice president, Enterprise Mobility and Client Endpoint Management, IDC says in a boilerplate statement: “Strong support for Apple devices — Macs as well as iPhones, iPads, and Apple TVs — is becoming a must-have function for UEM software providers.”

Hochmuth also observes: “Growth in Mac usage among business users, especially for employees working remotely and given their choice of PC device, is pushing more businesses to formally adopt management tools and strategies around macOS, along with iOS/iPadOS and tvOS.”

That’s good news for Jamf and for other vendors selected for this collection by IDC: Zoho, VMWare, Quest, Microsoft, Micro Focus, Matrix 42, Ivanti/MobileIron, IBM, Google, Citrix, Cisco, BlackBerry, and smaller vendors that didn’t make the list, as the extent of the collection represents the available market opportunity.

Tool for deployment in a multi-everything enterprise

Jamf gets special status in the report because it covers all the bases from deployment to security across the lifecycle of Apple’s devices within an optimized Apple user experience, with remote configuration and zero-touch deployment baked in.

While it’s great to see Jamf gain recognition for its focus on supporting Apple, it’s even more significant when you consider the extent to which IDC’s analysis shows the transformation of enterprise IT.

We already knew that enterprise computing had become multi-platform, multi-device and (increasingly) multi-cloud. COVID-19 has accelerated trends toward remote working and accentuated challenges around remote device provision, protection, and support.

Employee choice has also been amplified during this time — there’s a reason Starling Bank purchased all available MacBooks in the UK as it first sent employees home last year. The latest IDC data shows that far from being an outlier, there has been a bit of a boom in Mac deployment across the ‘Work From Home’ enterprise.

A remarkable story

Think back when Mac marketshare hovered around 3% with near zero presence in enterprise IT. Driven by the iMac and iPod halo and accelerated by the iPhone, Apple has somehow managed to parlay that tiny sliver of sales into a rather convincing 23% share in the enterprise.

One image shared by Jamf CEO Dean Hager shows this transformation in action: taken from Statcounter, it shows how Windows usage in the U.S. has declined as Mac use has increased — most dramatically in the last few years.

With Apple’s M1 Macs promising to put the platform at the top of the heap in terms of computational performance, it’s unlikely we’ll see much change in the direction of travel.

New opportunity?

That’s interesting for enterprises in a quandary around Mac deployments, but deeply significant for any entrepreneur seeking fresh opportunity in the market of services and support provision for enterprise Macs.

Developers will surely be asking themselves how these platforms can support new productivity experiences for this changed enterprise ecosystem. That’s certainly Microsoft’s approach.

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