Brian Keare star at a complex splasher on his Mac all mean solar day long , watching sales and inventorying stream in and out of his small company in southern California . “ Who would have thought that a finance cat like me would be on a Mac ? ” says Keare , CFO of Circle of Friends , which sells baby bath products .
Keare uses business software system from SaaS provider NetSuite . The Mac , he say , is great for deplumate 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 lighten up quick . “ It loads in under 10 seconds compared to 30 or 45 seconds on any other internet browser , ” Keare says , bring that Safari 4 beta did n’t work so well running on a microcomputer .
[ CIOs deliberate the high cost of Macs for employee . | Find out the top enterpriseMac support websites . ]
patronage software has traditionally been Apple ’s verboten fruit . Few , if any , of the popular ERP package ran on Macs or required emulators to do so . But cloud computation and undetermined source software have made platforms somewhat meaningless - and now Enterprise Resource Planning ( ERP ) is within Apple ’s reach . “ Things are becoming more platform agnostic , ” says Alex Morken , IT managing director of Chris King Precision Components . The manufacturer of bicycle components uses Macs to tap into unresolved source ERP software from xTuple .
Apple has n’t neglect the signs , either . Apple late updated its serial of 30 - moment , online seminars for accountancy and ERP . Apple ’s ERP seminars cover five Cartesian product : QuickBooks for small business ; AccountEdge for up to 50 employee ; MoneyWorks for concern with more than 20 concurrent user ; AcctVantage for businesses with more than 50 concurrent users ; and PowerEasy for companies that demand to incorporate fiscal reporting and tracking with inventory , sale , buying and time , and charge .
Of course , Apple has a long way to go in ERP . Large companies lam on industrial strength software package from Oracle and SAP . Midmarket companies gravitate toward ERP software like Microsoft Dynamics GP ( formerly Great Plains ) . small companies ride mostly on SaaS and open beginning ERP providers like NetSuite and xTuple , which have seen an uptick in Macs access their software .
“ We see more Macs on a pct base each yr , ” say Ned Lilly , CEO of xTuple . “ I would estimate that presently , across all users in all client , the mix is about 70 percent Windows , 25 pct Mac and 5 per centum Linux . But the issue of customers that have some Macs consort xTuple is likely closer to 35 percent . ”
Max Katz Bag Company , a manufacturer of synthetic construction and other industry product , run its business on Great Plains Software before switch to NetSuite . The company want to bring Macs into its computing environment , yet Microsoft get Great Plains ( now Microsoft Dynamics GP ) and withdrew support for the Mac , says Ken Daniel , IT managing director at Max Katz Bag . A little more than two year ago , Daniel moved to NetSuite in part to be able to access ERP with either a Mac or PC . “ With swarm computing , I gave up the political program wars , ” he says .
The Phone has given rise to byplay software as well as Macs . On the CRM front , many EXEC want to access data over iPhones . In turn , iPhones work better with Macs , which has led to more Macs descend to cultivate through the back door .
“ I got my sale stave iPhones , replace blackberry , because it ’s much easier to connect and see information from our SaaS providers , ” state CEO Brad Kugler of DVA , a distributor of video and audio equipment . Circle of Friends ’ Keare , who also rolled out iPhones to his bailiwick staff , agrees . “ Before , on Palm , you literally could not access NetSuite , ” Keare sound out . “ The Sir Frederick Handley Page are just too big ; they ram the browsers . ”
Both Kugler and Keare say this has lead to gross sales staff call for for Macs , not PCs , to synchronise with their iPhones . Last month , software program developer Celigo announced the availability of NetSyncX , a software system help that supply synchronization between NetSuite and the Mac for calendaring , tasks , contacts and einsteinium - ring mail . “ It would have been great to have this connecter a farseeing sentence ago to let Entourage users synchronize the same as Outlook users , ” says Malin Huffman , master product manager at NetSuite .
Huffman has work on get NetSuite Mac friendly for years , and only recently has cloud computing ’s hope of weapons platform independence been realized . The maturation of connection standards and the growth of more consistent browser app has made it easier for Macs to at last access ERP computer software in the same way a personal computer does . “ In the last couple of years , ” Huffman say , “ we ’ve turned the corner . ”
