Exclusive Sebastian Gunningham, the high-profile executive wooed to lead Apple’s enterprise sales division, has left the company, Think Secret has learned. Gunningham’s hiring was considered a sign that Apple was serious about taking on corporate markets, and his departure raises questions about Apple’s success in future enterprise sales.
Enterprise Sales Exec Leaves Apple, ThinkSecret Reveals
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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all apple needs is a typical, all white billboard that says “unix + fullyfunctional gui tools = enterprise.” the product sells its self..
never herd of the guy mentioned…
all apple needs is a typical, all white billboard that says “unix + fullyfunctional gui tools = enterprise.” the product sells its self..
never herd of the guy mentioned…
It would be nice if it was ready for enterprise, but i don’t think it is still there yet. IMHO.
e.g. gui=extra overhead on servers.
not as fast as other os’s.. such as NIX..
can’t handle as many clients.
I can’t say i have a datasheet to prove it with benchmarks or what not. But i am speaking for the enterprise i work for.
some clients have the new g5’s and they aren’t that “snappy” although they have 1gb of ram. Although they have nice LCD’s.
I’ve seen panther servers not handle well when there are a lot of clients.
my laptop is slow, running panther on a g3 600mhz with 640mb .. like i heard hard drive thrashing, it takes awhile to load safari, I am comparing my laptop to a pIII 800mhz with 512mb of ram that was a good laptop about 3 years ago..
some one should tell MS that windows is not ready for the enterprise then.
> I’ve seen panther servers not handle well when there are a lot of clients.
At least you’ve been able to see it then. I haven’t had the pleasure.
I have had the misfortune of having to work with a Windows 2000 server that couldn’t handle 20 clients well. I tended to blame the application software we were using. I figured there must be a better way. Probably the clients were poorly designed and just over polling the server, but…
Isn’t it true that a Mac cluster is currently the third fastest computer in the world? Could be better though, right?
You seem a little quick to dismiss this ‘Nix’ without any numbers at all to justify it.
you can easily boot os x into a command line interface, and not load the gui. the OS is based on mach and freebsd, and the enterprise (cheap!!!) license allows for limitless connections… I think Darwin is just lacking in ‘respect’ among industry leaders’.
People come and go from companies all the time. I don’t think you can base any future of apple on one person. Unless it’s a one person company.
Personally, I don’t believe Apple really wants into enterprise computing. Far too many headaches, and not nearly enough potential for profit. They seem to be pretty content with their current position. Getting BIGGER isn’t always a great plan for success, and it has been known to create exactly the opposite effect.
“I have had the misfortune of having to work with a Windows 2000 server that couldn’t handle 20 clients well. I tended to blame the application…”
It’s easy to write bad software for any platform, so blaming the software isn’t a bad first step.
I’ve worked on Windows 2000 web apps that had to support hundreds of simultaneous users, and the OS never got in the way.
I’ve also worked on Linux based Java web apps that couldn’t handle *two* simultaneous users.
Does this mean that Windows is good and Linux bad? Nope. Just means that one app was properly written, and the other was garbage.
“Isn’t it true that a Mac cluster is currently the third fastest computer in the world?”
That doesn’t really matter, though. If you can set up a Linux cluster that’s *much* cheaper and performs half as well as “the next leading cluster,” then that might be good enough to serve your needs.
The problem is that Apple hardware/software/services cost too much. Linux has been succeeding because you can stick it on your grandma’s toaster and serve up web apps from it.
The other problem is that Apple doesn’t have a lot of mindshare as a *nix company. The fact that tech support won’t even handle command-line issues (for personal installs, anyway) is a good indicator that they could do a little more work in order to gain some acceptance in this area.
The xserve stuff is pretty, but do businesses really *need* pretty?
I think the answer is “no.”
I don’t know many geeks who wouldn’t take an xserve instead of a vanilla Linux box, but I don’t know many managers who would sign the check.
I don’t know if you intentionally did this, but you bring up an interesting point. While the typical white background ads Apple uses might appeal to the creative/professional users and consumers, it does nothing to really explain “why” Apple is reliable for enterprise use.
Seems to me if they want to increase enterprise sales, they have to cater advertisements to enterprise users.
Then again, Gunningham might have left for other reasons.
Enterprise sales? Apple? Get real. If they wanted enterprise sales, they hired the wrong guy. That guy is a farmer – he trades off the brand name of the company he’s got, and stuffs more product into the pipeline. That kind of guy is terrible at bootstrapping sales into any market, much less the enterprise market.
If Apple had gotten a Sun or IBM/AIX guy then maybe they’d have been serious, but an Oracle guy? C’mon!
I have no doubt about the power and ease of use regarding Apple hardware, some middleware (WebObjects), system administration and basic user applications. However, I have not seen systems architecture, analysis & design and project management that is essential for the Apple to move out of the SOHO market and into larger companies which require a sound development methodology, systems architecture, planning, decision science support …
Software products from the likes of SciForma, Popkin, Metasoft, IBM’s MQ and Rational and so on do not exist for OS X to my knowledge. Apple development tools focus too much on the presentation rather than the retrieval and manipulation of information as well.
It takes more than glorified drawing programs with a multitude of templates to penetrate companies with progressive IT departments.
As much as I hate to say it, but I think Steve is too focused on consumers and prosumers… and it shows. I think the whole industry sees it. If it’s not music, then it’s movies. Disney and Pixar, Apple and the record industry, it goes on and on. But what about the computers? Where is the focus? I agree with the above poster, they need to hire serious individuals who can carry them into the enterprise. Change those ads too from white, it delivers the wrong message.
Don’t you guys agree?
> That doesn’t really matter, though. If you can set up a Linux cluster that’s
> *much* cheaper and performs half as well as “the next leading cluster,”
> then that might be good enough to serve your needs.
The G5 was chosen for the Virginia Tech cluster because it was *much* cheaper than anything available from Dell or others.
“When Virginia Tech’s Apple G5 cluster first was announced last fall, many industry observers noted that its stellar price/performance ratio stood in sharp contrast with Apple’s past reputation for high-priced hardware.
IDC analyst Swenson said the G5, along with Apple’s Unix-based OS X , has changed that reputation. In fact, he said, price/performance ratio was Virginia Tech’s argument for choosing Mac computers in the first place.”
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/32701.html
Check into it.
> Change those ads too from white, it delivers the wrong message.
Strange bias. I guess a serious ad from a real enterprise-focused company should feature something like… oh I don’t know, a guy dressed as a butterfly?
Change those ads too from white, it delivers the wrong message.
Eh? Speak for yourself. I can’t stand overly busy ads. Besides, a fat penguin certainly doesn’t speak enterprise too me.
But you are right, Apple does tend to focus on desktop stuff. If I’m going to get an expensive server it will probably be a Sun or SGI or IBM. But whatever, I still want an Apple notebook, OS X looks to be the perfect unix desktop for me.
“The G5 was chosen for the Virginia Tech cluster because it was *much* cheaper than anything available from Dell or others.”
And then:
“many industry observers noted that its stellar price/performance ratio”
A good price/performance ratio isn’t the same thing as *cheap*.
At about $25,000 a pop, the Subaru WRX is a very fast car for the price. However, that’s quite a bit more expensive than your average get-around-town type car.
If all you need it an average get-around-town type car, then the power/price ratio of the WRX is immaterial.
Yes I know a butterfly was dumb, but that was for msn8 internet service and not for enterpise products. I wonder who agreed to sell off Microsoft with a butterfly?! Didn’t Gates or Ballmer think, hey wait a minute now, a butterfly?! LOL.
My comment and someone else’s about the white background, does not differeniate Apple from consumer to enterprise. If some of us think this way, imagine what the decision makers think in that industry? They don’t want pretty things in a white background to buy since it doesn’t look serious enough. I know it sounds funny, but isn’t that why you have a marketing department or hire someone else to help you sell your product to the right individuals? Apple looks like they do everything a certain way and cannot “Think Different”.
Before running billboard ads, Apple might want to have a look at it’s server line. I don’t think that enterprise clients would like having to buy and install SCSI drives separately (Apple does not seem to offer any machine with SCSI drives).
but apple do sell fiber chanel arrays . so i dont think there is a scsi problem. and price if you talk about enterprise appel does have good price. the dual opteron isnt that cheap.
and dont begin with the prices of sunservers and such.
I think that arrays of IDE drives and those lean mean 15000 RPM SCSI drives serve completely different niches. You can’t claim that one is the replacement for another.
You guys are comparing Apples and oranges, pun intened. The Virginia Tech cluster is a high performance computing application. The cost per FLOP, real not projected, of the G5 cluster was better than the equivalent computer made from Dell components with a Linux base. In fact the cost per FLOP of the G5 cluster was better than by a long shot than the entire rest of the top five, and I believe the top ten as well. The top five contained Linux clusters using various base platforms as well as proprietary vector supercomputers. Those are the facts.
That being said, this has absolutely nothing to do with the enterprise. “Enterprise” computing has an entirely different set of issues than the high performance scientific computing market. The fact that the G5 cluster offers unprecedented cost/performance ratios there does not reflect the equivalent cost/performance ratios in the enterprise. They may be there also, but that data cannot be infered from the Virginia Tech experiment.
A good price/performance ratio isn’t the same thing as *cheap*.
Isn’t that the joy of clusters? If you only have half as much money you buy half as many computers and get roughly half as much performance, thereby maintaining the price/performance ratio.
~$3,000 increments would seem to give enterprise buyers quite a bit of manuevering room to decide just how much computing power they can afford.
In fact, in an enterprise environment, the price/performance ratio should get better for smaller clusters, since there’s less upfront costs to put it together.
MFLOPS is hardly a good measure of perfomance. Just read this: http://futuretech.mirror.vuurwerk.net/perf.html
Now, if we talk about HPC market, Apple also misses a crucial thing. At least half-honest marketing.
While Apple’s advertising term FLOP is not the scientific computing term (they use single precision versus double precision) the Virgnia Tech cluster was benchmarked with double precision mathematics routines. The Top500 benchmark is considered to accurately reflect the performance of a machine in real world applications.
The Top500 benchmark is considered to accurately reflect the performance of a machine in a single class of real world applications. It is just a single application, unlike SPEC, which contains several programs with different architectural preferences. The other problem with Top500 is that results depend on interconnect speed, and so there are more factors that might distort the picture.
A potential HPC buyer will need for a lot more then a single benchmark score that Apple marketers didn’t manage to “correct”.