Image via Needham & Company
Let it be known that Apple has been doing a lot of business with, um, business.
According to the number crunchers at Needham & Company, Apple's sales to business customers grew upwards of 50% during the second fiscal quarter of 2010--that's three times the increase enjoyed by PC manufacturers to the same sector, who could only claim a 12.1% rise in their sales.
What's to blame for the corporate sector's sudden love affair with the Mac? There's a few possibilities.
Needham's Senior Analyst Charles Wolf suggested that many of the sales to big business and government that Apple is currently enjoying can be attributed to the iPhone's "halo effect," which in plain english means that the people with the power to decide what gets bought love their iPhones so much that they decide that the purchase of other Apple products for their companies is a pretty good idea. With both the iPad and the iPhone being targeted to button-down types through improvements to the way that Cupertino's gear handles enterprise-level security and mail server integration technology, you can be sure that Apple will be looking to take steps to further leverage the inroads into the enterprise market--a realm that until recently was the undisputed territory of the Windows PC.
