Personally, I think we are some way away from the day when Apple truly enters the mental "options available" list of the average CIO, but I don't think there is much question that the company is making inroads into corporate America's IT toolbox. Spurred on largely by the iPhone and sleek, status-symbol devices such as the Macbook Air, Apple is pushing into the awareness of corporate IT via a wave of demands from the executive suite and individual users who have seen A Better Way and want to bring it to work.

In some ways, this is no different from the ways that PCs originally entered corporate America... individuals and departments circumvented Mainframe IT to bring in desktops which could cheaply and easily accomplish their work faster and with fewer hurdles than punchcards and paper tape. IT came around to the PC more gradually in many cases; embodying an odd mixture of adventurism and conservatism then as now, many IT departments were excited by the latest teleprinter technology but had to have the paradigm-shifting PCs shoved down their throats.

The potential for success in this effort lays not in any support or initiative by Apple itself, but rather by the advent of other new technologies which are suddenly making platform-independent operation much more viable for IT departments to support. In fact, in some of the companies where Apple is making notable in-roads (Google, for example), it's not so much because Macs themselves are supported, but simply because users are given their choice of a number of available platforms to work from.

It doesn't hurt that Microsoft has slipped up badly with the Vista version of Windows at the same time. BusinessWeek recently tied the ham-handedness of the XP to Vista transition to new demand for Macs. I'm not sure it's quite so clear-cut, but there's not much question that the combination of Microsoft's problems, SaaS and web-based applications exploding, and the increasing personalization of technology are all feeding into Apple's new shot at respectability in the corporate environment.

Although BusinessWeek also suggests that doing so might not be in its best interest (corporate buyers are used to more frugal purchases) it's a bit puzzling that Apple has made almost no effort to encourage this movement. As I've noted before, the real obstacle for many IT departments lies in the way Apple does business, not the core technologies they use. But to the extent that corporate IT is starting to simply not care what users run personally, and decreasing their bubble of responsibility to core services, Apple will increasingly be used for business purposes as it expands in the consumer market, by dint of the simple fact that users will use their personal devices to the greatest extent possible for work. This will happen whether corporate IT actively encourages it or simply turns a blind eye; and since it's becoming more in their interests to manage services rather than devices, it seems inevitable that Apple will have a burgeoning presence in corporate computing.