Not everything that Rowles wants to see in LANDesk's Management Suite is there now. He said that the software has weaknesses when it comes to letting users directly set group policies into Microsoft's Active Directory or the Mac's equivalent technology, which is called Open Directory.

And Rowles said he's cautious about giving too much credit at this point to LANDesk's new Mac remote-software deployment feature, which he has played around with. "It shows a lot of promise," he said politely.

Gartner's Cosgrove said another feature that cross-platform management vendors have largely failed to port over to the Mac is a so-called targeted software distribution capability, which lets administrators deploy software to users and not simply to PCs.