IT professionals have mixed feelings about Apple, survey finds

Apple is increasingly pushing itself into the lucrative world of enterprise IT budgets as a way to expand sales of its iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

But enterprise IT folks have mixed feelings about the company, according to a survey of 900 of them from Spiceworks, a social networking site for IT professionals.

For instance, IT professionals are watching and talking about Apple a lot.

It ranked second only to Dell in terms of hardware brands discussed by IT pros on Spiceworks this year. 

And that’s saying something given that Dell sells everything from PC and servers to storage and networking equipment, and it just completed a massive acquisition of EMC.

But Apple is not considered a particularly “innovative” brand to watch in 2017. Only 16 per cent surveyed believed that it was. More people thought that Microsoft was innovative. Amazon scored far higher too, and Google outscored them all.

One reason that Apple’s reputation for innovation has fallen behind among IT folks is this: It’s not considered much of a player in the upcoming tech trends that IT pros are watching and talking about.

IT pros are heavily watching 3D printers and the Internet of Things, two areas where Apple isn’t involved.

They are also watching Artificial Intelligence. Apple claims it has game here with features like identifying a caller from your email, telling you where you parked your car, or surfacing a hotel address from a reservation stored in email. But again, Apple is not as a tech company moving the AI ball the way Google and Microsoft are doing with both their products and their cloud services.

Apple isn’t much involved in the hot area of virtual reality, beyond some so-called secret projects, either.

With Siri, Apple is a major player in Intelligent Assistants. However, that’s the least interesting of all the upcoming tech to IT pros.

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