Traditionally, the world of IT management and technology in general is dominated by the PC.
Ever since Microsoft’s rise to power, it has remained the go-to choice for the majority of businesses in the majority of business sectors.
Apple, once contained to a specific niche of creative fields, is becoming an increasingly important rival in the business and tech sectors, however. As this development continues, it is becoming more important for managed IT firms to offer Apple Mac support components.
I interviewed one of the leaders in this field, CEO Jason Dettbarn of Addigy, to find out what managed IT firms need to know about Apple compatibility in this context.
Misconceptions About Apple Compatibility
There is pressure in all business sectors to integrate into the Apple world. Most managed IT services that have not yet made the jump into integrating Apple services into their businesses do so because of some misconceptions about how to do so. Let’s clear those up first:
- You do not need an Apple Certified Engineer to offer professional managed IT services on a Mac platform
- You do not need to get an Apple-using client onboard before reorganizing your business to offer Apple services
- Just because you don’t fully utilize your existing remote monitoring and management software doesn’t mean you cannot put the tools in place to offer these services now.
The Addigy platform offers a friendly user interface that Windows users find manageable and accessible. This makes it possible to offer Apple services to your clients without having to spend months preparing your team for coding Mac computers.
Advantages to Offering Apple Services
As a managed IT services provider, extending the services you offer to include Apple Mac systems elevates the level of service you offer your customers without displacing any internal resources your company already uses. Secondly, you give yourself access to top-line revenue from the types of businesses that invest in Apple Mac computers in the first place—those computers are not cheap, and you can earn up to three times more per machine simply because they are Apple iMacs, Mac Pros or Macbooks.
Since IT management for Mac systems is less widely available on the general market, you can charge more for cleaning and securing Mac computers than you would for the same project on a PC. Securing or cleaning these computers does not require any more work than securing or cleaning PCs, however. This produces attractive, immediate profit margins.
Sell Mac Security to Your Apple Clients
One of the misconceptions that needs to be addressed here is the idea that Apple computers are somehow more resistant to security vulnerabilities than their PC counterparts. This isn’t true, and public vulnerability data exists to corroborate this fact. Apple users tend to believe this, however, pointing to the fact that relatively few Apple-specific malware applications exist in the wild—they’re coming.
You can be ahead of the game by offering security to your Mac clients, using widely available data and statistics to show that Apple computers are not bulletproof and do benefit from professional managed IT services. It is only a matter of time before this valuable segment of the market becomes as saturated and competitive as its PC counterpart is, so Dettbarn encourages to begin now.
Stuart Crawford is an IT services and managed services marketing expert. He founded Ulistic in 2010 and has been a regular contributor to CDN ever since.
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