Macs in the Enterprise: ERP

Brian Keare stares at a complex dashboard on his Mac all day long, watching sales and inventory flow in and out of his small company in southern California. "Who would have thought that a finance guy like me would be on a Mac?" says Keare, CFO of Circle of Friends, which sells baby bath products.

Keare uses business software from SaaS provider NetSuite. The Mac, he says, is great for pulling financial data from the cloud. NetSuite's user interface has a ton of JavaScript, and so Keare uses Safari 4 beta on a Mac, which renders JavaScript lightening quick. "It loads in under 10 seconds compared to 30 or 45 seconds on any other browser," Keare says, adding that Safari 4 beta didn't work so well running on a PC.

[ CIOs debate the high cost of Macs for employees. | Find out the top enterprise Mac support websites. ]

Business software has traditionally been Apple's forbidden fruit. Few, if any, of the popular ERP packages ran on Macs or required emulators to do so. But cloud computing and open source software have made platforms somewhat meaningless-and now ERP is within Apple's reach. "Things are becoming more platform agnostic," says Alex Morken, IT manager of Chris King Precision Components. The manufacturer of bicycle components uses Macs to tap into open source ERP software from xTuple.

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