Apple takes steps to expand corporate market

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc is stepping up forays into a corporate business dominated by Microsoft Corp and PC makers like Dell Inc, by ensuring its new Mac operating system can gain smooth access to enterprise email, just as Outlook can.

On Monday, Apple unveiled the OS X Snow Leopard, available on all Mac computers from September and to developers now. It includes support for "Exchange," which lets users access email, calendars and addresses from a remote location.

"That's going to help a great deal in the enterprise market," Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said told Reuters.

"We need to help those customers have a really good solution so that their IT department is comfortable with the Mac," he said. "And we've done many things over the years, but I think a really big one today was this Exchange support."

Analysts said Exchange marked a significant step toward expanding Apple's footprint in a market traditionally dominated by Microsoft Windows computers, with the biggest PC makers Hewlett-Packard Co, Dell and Lenovo.

"It's huge. It opens up the entire enterprise market with support for one of the most important mission-critical applications, namely Exchange," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with Interpret, a media and technology research firm.

He noted that Apple will include Exchange in its operating system, while Microsoft sells it separately.

Other analysts saw a boost for the consumer market.

"I don't think people in the audience understood how incredibly huge that is for Apple," said Current Analysis analyst Avi Greengart.

But "it's not necessarily that enterprises will go off and deploy hundreds of Macs, but if I'm a consumer considering, 'Do I want to move to a Mac or not?' and am buying a machine for dual use, using it in my home but I want to be able to connect to the office, Exchange will allow me to connect to the office and still have a Mac user experience."

Apple took a few swipes at Microsoft during its presentation, referring to Windows 7, Microsoft's upcoming operating system, as "old technology."

But the company depends on Microsoft for its Office applications, which also run on Apple's products. During the presentation, executives referred to Microsoft Office as the standard for office applications.

(Reporting by David Lawsky; Editing by Richard Chang)