The enterprise opportunity Apple is hiding from

The power of the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) marketing machine is strong -- the machines are just cool -- and while Apple is focused squarely on the consumer segment, with products such as the iPhone, Apple products are coming onto the radar of the IT department more and more. It's called the halo effect; Apple's consumer success is causing users to agitate to have the same cool tools that they use at home available at the office as well.

While IT had a list of tried and true answers to bar Apple for many years -- cost of support, compatibility with Windows networks, cost of acquisition -- those barriers have been coming down, one by one. New management tools make managing mixed networks simple. Apple's move to the Intel chipset makes managing mixed environments easy -- you can even run Windows on a Mac device. And the increased reliability of an Apple machine can net-out the marginal difference in acquisition cost.

So, increasingly, there is a stronger and stronger case to be made for bringing Apple into the enterprise market. The question is, is the enterprise a market that the fiercely consumer-focused company even wants to go after

Apple stays silent

On that question, the jury is out. Apple Canada declined several requests to be interviewed for this feature, and Apple has also declined requests from several U.S. publications on the same topic in recent years. In Asia, however, Apple executives seem more willing to discuss the business case for the Mac.