Where are the rest of Apple’s enterprise products?

Now that Apple has embraced the enterprise market with the iPhone where are the rest of the enterprise products? Apple has spent the time to invest in a relationship with businesses by building the new iPhone software, now they should apply this philosophy across their entire product line. For example, they should bolster their Xserve offerings and their xSAN product. Such a move would entice the business market to use Apple’s robust server operating system and hardware platform.

To do this they must do a few things:

-Release more hardware configurations – Currently there is really only one xServe, which starts at $2999 for a basic configuration with no hard drives, no RAID, etc. Essentially they need to release a “Mac Mini” Version of the Xserve; something that is server class, but at a lower price point. I would further argue that they need something along the lines of a server class headless iMac as well. This would put them in the sub-$1000, $1500, and $3000-and-up categories.

-Put Boot Camp on the Xserve – For some unknown reason Apple does not want you to run Linux or Windows on your Xserve. This could be that they do not wish to develop drivers, but it is foolish of them to assume that a company would only need Mac OS to run their company.

-Commit to Xsan – Commit to Xsan for the next 5 years. From my experience companies that are looking for a simple cross-platform SAN have looked at Apple’s Xsan, but have been hesitant for fear that Apple will abruptly stop future development because they refuse to market it.

-Open up Xsan – Create an Open Source version of Xsan to spur development and interoperability with other operating systems.

-Buy Likewise Software – Likewise software makes a product that allows Windows admins to apply Group Policies to the Macs on their network. This is huge! As someone that runs a mixed network, the inability to easily manage and update the Macs in the same fashion as the Windows boxes is a huge time drag. Likewise software has done a good job of attempting to solve this, but it would be better if it was integrated into the OS.

-Buy Zimbra from Yahoo! - Apple needs a group messaging platform. Sure they have pieces of one now with their iCal server and their built in implementation of Sendmail, but they lack a cohesive Messaging Platform. Zimbra already natively runs on Mac OS (as well as Linux) and has a huge following.

-Create a Windows iChat Client – iChat is by far the best IM client that I have ever used, but it is not available on Windows. Yes, I know that you can use any Jabber client on Windows, but you lose some features that the iChat Server provides. The fact that Mac OS X Server has a built in IM server is huge for Apple.