TOM KEMP'S CENTRIFY BLOG

The Enterprise Desktop Alliance: Making it Easy to Manage and Integrate Macs in a Windows Environment

Monday, June 30, 2008

Today five enterprise software companies announced the creation of the Enterprise Desktop Alliance (EDA) to facilitate the acceptance of the Mac in environments managed with Microsoft Windows. Centrify is pleased to be one of these five software companies participating in the EDA. Big kudos go out to our marketing, product management and business development teams for initially envisioning such an alliance and doing the legwork to help put it together with a bunch of other great teams from our partners who were equally eager to make this alliance happen.

The alliance will validate and promote the availability of solutions that make it easy to deploy, integrate and manage Macs using Microsoft Windows-based solutions, thereby increasing user productivity, reducing total cost of ownership and increasing IT acceptance of Macs in the enterprise. Founding members include:

• Atempo - Enterprise Data Protection
• Centrify - Identity & Access Management
• Group Logic - File & Print Services
• LANRev - Systems Lifecycle Management
• Parallels - Virtualization

The EDA exists because there is a major need for customer education about how enterprises can successfully deploy, integrate and centrally manage Macs in a Windows environment. Customers are clamoring for solutions, but don't know they are available. We exist because there is a significant need for greater community and communications among IT professionals seeking to support the Macintosh in the enterprise. As such, EDA will be hosting a series of events, including webcasts and seminars, and will provide white papers, product information and other resources on the EDA website (www.enterprisedesktopalliance.com).

How the EDA Came Out About

As some of our readers may recall, Centrify was the first vendor to deliver the ability to use the Windows Group Policy infrastructure to manage the Mac OS X platform with Mac-specific Group Policies. On the market for over two years now, we still lead the industry in delivering the widest, deepest and most battle-tested set of GPOs to enable Mac desktop lockdown and configuration management. (For more information on our Mac solution, you can also check out this great webinar we did with Apple.)

In engaging with enterprise customers who were looking to bring some Macs into their Windows environment, we found these customers were not only eager to hear how to better integrate Macs into Windows from an Active Directory -perspective (which we deliver), but were peppering us with questions regarding what our other Mac customers were doing to integrate their Mac into their enterprise. We were being told your software is great, but out of curiosity can you, Centrify, recommend or do you know of any software that can help me distribute software to both Macs and Windows OR enable file and print services in a mixed environment OR do backup OR virtualize a mixed desktop environment etc.?? Or they were telling us "OK I am going ahead with your solution but I also have a product from such and such Mac/Windows vendor (e.g. Group Logic), can your solutions integrate with it?" (BTW, DirectControl does integrate nicely with Group Logic).

Ironically, at the same time our partners in the EDA were getting the same questions from their customers, and whenever we (Centrify) participated in WWDC or MacWorld or a local Apple event, the other members of the EDA were usually the only vendors there also talking about integrating Macs into the enterprise. So we kept on bumping into each other and started to informally recommend each others solutions to our customers, and then it clicked to formalize this relationship into an alliance.

What Mac Users and IT Pros Get with the EDA

The combined solutions from the EDA partners really let Macs be Macs in a Windows environment. What I mean is our collective solutions let Mac users enjoy the full Mac experience without compromise, namely

• They are unaware they are in a Windows infrastructure
• They see an improved experience by delivering:
• improved system performance
• single sign-on
• transparent updates and patch management
• file or system recovery without administrator intervention
• They see streamlined access to Windows-only apps and productivity tools

For IT Pros, the EDA suite of solutions enables IT departments to deploy, integrate and manage Macs throughout the enterprise by applying the same standard Windows-based management tools to support Macs as they do Windows. By leveraging a centralized, uniform management platform, administrators can deliver identical services and exercise the same controls for both Macs and Windows.

For example, Admins can deliver the same standards of service, maintain uniform client configuration, enforce the same security controls, make the same sharepoints and print queues available, deliver the same disaster recovery, and enforce the same compliance policies for both Mac and Windows systems. And those same capabilities can be applied to the virtual version of Windows that runs on the Mac.

Building a Community

But the key thing with the Enterprise Desktop Alliance that we are striving to do is bring like-minded customers together, so they can also talk directly to their colleagues in the industry while they are also talking to the vendors. So our collective vision is to build a sense of community for users and IT personnel deploying Macs in the enterprise as a complement to some of the existing forums that exist out there. As mentioned we are doing seminars where customers can network each other, and the website will be providing content such as webinars, whitepapers, etc. and eventually we will have customers start contributing content themselves (e.g. best practices templates, etc.).

So check out www.enterprisedesktopalliance.com today, and be sure to register to hear about the upcoming events and activities the alliance will be sponsoring.

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