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On Wednesday, ERP vendor PeopleSoft announced plans to certify its Enterprise One 8.94 suite for Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) Safari Web browser in the fourth quarter of 2004. PeopleSoft's Enterprise One is primarily used in the manufacturing and service industries and deploys as a modular Web-based suite of applications for managing and supporting physical assets.
"Since most customers need to support a wide range of computing environments, enabling their users to access PeopleSoft applications through their choice of Web browser is critical," PeopleSoft group vice president Jesper Andersen said.
"Today's announcement demonstrates the enterprise applications industry's strongest commitment to the Macintosh platform and to Apple users in the enterprise."
Enterprise Goes Macintosh
While PeopleSoft told MacNewsWorld it does not break out licensing by operating system, David Sayed, product marketing manager of PeopleSoft Technology said the company has several large customers on the Mac platform, including the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Florida.
PeopleSoft already has certified its PeopleTools 8.21 and 8.45, which are development environments for PeopleSoft users to extend, maintain and upgrade PeopleSoft infrastructures, for Safari.
PeopleSoft is not the only enterprise application concern that has announced Mac OS X compatibility this week. On Wednesday, hosted application service provider (ASP) NetSuite announced native Safari Web-browser support for its suite of hosted sales and customer 
service solutions, which includes NetERP, NetCRM and the Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) Small Business Suite, which the company licenses from Oracle.
Meanwhile, Oracle, which announced a joint database road show with Apple late last month, announced plans Wednesday to make Oracle technology available to Mac OS X developers by the second half of 2004.
Certifying Standards
According to Sayed, PeopleSoft's commitment to the Mac platform is nothing new. He stated that PeopleSoft has supported it since the introduction of PeopleSoft 8, its pure Internet architecture, for Mac versions of Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, back in 2000.
In Sayed's view, the certification of Safari is really about standards, and will add it to its list of approved browsers, which includes the aforementioned browsers and Mozilla.
"Our product makes extensive use of Internet standards -- and Safari's support of these standards has facilitated its support by PeopleSoft applications," Sayed said.
An Enterprise Alternative
For her part, Forrester CRM analyst Erin Kinikin said that the move to certify enterprise applications for OS X is being driven by several things.
"Mac seems to have solidified its position as a Windows alternative, especially in the home, which is important for sales reps and in the small business market, where NetSuite also competes," Kinikin told MacNewsWorld.
Kinikin also said that while Apple's market share is not large in the enterprise, pockets of Mac users exist within those environments.
"Supporting Mac helps spread applications to new groups and avoid islands of users out of touch with the rest of the company," Kinikin explained, adding that all users within a given corporate base -- whether they use OS X, Linux or Windows -- require like access to company information.
Recent Jupiter Research data provided to MacNewsWorld showed 14 percent of companies with US$50 million or greater revenues in the United States used Mac OS X within their network environments.
Opportunistic Play
Gartner (NYSE: IT) Group analyst Chad Eschinger said that PeopleSoft's moves toward supporting Mac OS X are to some degree an opportunistic play, even if customer demand was a strong driver.
"It is a different platform [PeopleSoft] can now support, and it [demonstrate] to their markets they are proactive," Eschinger told MacNewsWorld.
Kinikin concurred, adding that this type of competitive advantage play is part of doing business. In other words, companies certify for the Mac because they can.
"PeopleSoft has a very clean Internet architecture without a lot of Java script or downloads, and that makes it easier for them to support other browsers," she added.
Position Counts
Kinikin went on to say that although Mac OS X may not have a huge potential client base, its users often hold influential management or creative positions within a company.
"It's also about coverage -- showing companies that you can address the needs of all the users can be an advantage in the sales process," Kinikin said.
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