According to LANDesk, its Management Suite is used to manage more than a half-million Macs, in addition to a far greater number of PCs.

Terrence Cosgrove, a Gartner analyst, said via e-mail that among management tools vendors, LANDesk is furthest along in supporting Macs. He added that LANDesk Management Suite "can do OS deployment, data [and] settings migration, software distribution, inventory and remote control for Mac machines."

LANDesk said that one customer it declined to identify plans to increase the number of Macs used internally from about 400 now to 4,000 by year's end because of the new management capabilities. Version 8.8 already can administer and patch virtual machines, and late this year it will be able to manage Apple's iPhone devices, according to Coby Gurr, a business line manager at LANDesk.

The LANDesk Management Suite's next-closest competitor is Symantec Corp.'s Altiris Client Management Suite, a cross-platform software offering that a Symantec spokesman said is used by about 22,000 customers. The spokesman said Symantec doesn't have exact statistics on how many Macs are being managed with its software, but he added that "customer interest and sales of Altiris management solutions for the Mac skyrocketed in 2007."

Altiris has supported Macs since 2002. It introduced disk imaging and deployment features for the Apple systems last year, and the spokesman said that "more significant enhancements" are expected late in the year.

Better, but not all the way there

Even Apple has responded over the past several years, making many needed improvements to Apple Remote Desktop. That has pleased the growing number of Mac corporate sys admins, many of whom haunt Web sites such as MacEnterprise.org and search desperately for tips on how to better manage their Apple machines.

But although Apple Remote Desktop can remotely control Windows and Linux systems in addition to Macs, it relies on the Virtual Network Computing protocol, which some consider too insecure to use in corporate settings. As a result, Apple's software remains in practice a Mac-only tool.

So companies such as Harcourt, which now is part of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing following an acquisition completed last month, have turned to cross-platform tools from third-party vendors such as LANDesk to manage both Windows PCs and Macs from a single console.

Rowles said that LANDesk's cross-platform capabilities are its biggest selling point for him. "I'd say that 90% of the Windows features I need are available for the Mac," he added.

Michael Gonzalez, a senior IT analyst at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, agreed with Rowles' assessment. "For what I use it for, LANDesk is dead-on equal for Windows and Mac," Gonzalez said.

About 800 of the 6,300 systems used by Baylor employees or within its labs are Macs, Gonzalez said. He noted that LANDesk's cross-platform capability enables the university's IT department to have a liberal attitude toward different hardware platforms. And that is resulting in an uptick in Mac usage, Gonzalez said.

Meanwhile, Rowles said that LANDesk's software has helped Harcourt reduce its TCO for Macs even further. That should result in the company boosting the overall percentage of Macs among its end-user systems in the coming years. Currently, that figures stands at about 20%.

So what's still missing?