Once viewed as a plaything, the Macintosh is now the PC of choice for many hard-core technology professionals, and Macintosh skills are now an in-demand specialty among IT pros, rather than an afterthought.

"The Mac will be coming soon to a company near you, if it hasn't already," says Brian Vaughn, executive vice president of Dataprise, a network support and IT solutions provider.

The following factors have played a major role in the Mac's resurgence in the IT world:

• When Apple released OS X, an operating system with Unix underpinnings, the Macintosh "got the attention of hard-core techno-geeks and began gaining mindshare and market share among them," Vaughn says.
• The growth of the Internet and advances in networking technologies have removed some of the obstacles to combining disparate software and hardware, making hybrid computing environments more common.
• The popularity of the iPod and iTunes has generated a halo effect around Apple and Apple products, Vaughn says. With more and more people working from home, those with Macs and iPods need tools and support to connect their computers to non-Macintosh systems at the office.

"The Macintosh platform has come a long way," says Dean Shavit, general partner at MOST, a training and consulting company, and open-source editor-at-large for MacTech, a publication catering to Macintosh IT pros. "If you're a hard-core tech, having an OS X computer is the greatest thing in the world." You not only have a consumer-friendly operating system, he says, but also "a world of open-source software" and all the possibilities offered by Unix.

Who Needs Mac Skills?

While multimedia and design specialists have long used Macs, companies are now integrating the systems into their IT setups for a range of purposes. That means all sorts of techies should have some Macintosh expertise, including:

• System administrators.
• Network engineers.
• Database administrators.
• Programmers.
• Support professionals.

Depending on the position's specifics and the systems supported, some of these jobs require full-fledged Macintosh knowledge, while others may simply require a moderate level of Mac familiarity.

Opening a Window on Mac Training

At MOST, many techies with Windows expertise are signing up for Mac training, Shavit says. MOST's courses include the "Hands-on Five-Day Ultimate Administration Workshop" and the "Three-Day Mac OS X 10.4 Remote Desktop & Mass Deployment Workshop," among others. Apple's credentials have also gained more attention as the company's certification program has become more established and recognized, Shavit says.

System administrators and network professionals in particular are seeking Macintosh training because of the need to integrate Macs in mixed computing environments, Shavit says. Dealing with Macs as an island in a sea of Windows computers "is not cutting it any more," he says. Techies can prove their flexibility -- an increasingly sought-after trait by IT employers -- by demonstrating their facility with the Mac as well as with other systems.

Aside from training firms and Apple's certification programs, techies can gain know-how from the growing number of blogs devoted to the Macintosh from an IT perspective. O'Reilly Media, for instance, offers a variety of Macintosh books as well as bloggers who write about the Mac.

Attitude Adjustment

The about-face in attitude toward the Macintosh -- and what it means in terms of the skills IT professionals require -- was evident to Vaughn when one of Dataprise's clients, with about 100 computer users, made it clear that the company needed to have adequate Macintosh know-how. "Unless you can support our Macintosh enterprise, we're not going to be able to stay with you guys," Vaughn says Dataprise was told.

And now, with new Macs running on Intel chips, the Mac is capable of running not only Apple's OS X and Unix, but also Windows. "This ability to have the best of both worlds on a single machine will result in further inroads of the Macintosh platform into the mainstream business environment -- and increase the need for those who support company IT systems to be familiar with it," Vaughn says.