ITV to replace PCs with Macs across the business

The broadcaster will also migrate to Google Apps as part of a five-year transformation programme

ITV is to replace the majority of staff PCs with Apple Macs as part of a company-wide five-year transformation programme.

There is speculation that this will see the broadcaster move away from a PC-based infrastructure, meaning that the IT department will be better equipped to support the use of mobile products from Apple, including iPads and iPhones, within the business.

The majority of developers are creating applications for the iOS operating platform – Apple's mobile platform. And Apple has certainly been targetting the enterprise with recent desktop OS releases; the Mac OS X Lion platform designed for desktop Macs and released to market yesterday comprises many features designed with businesses in mind.

These include whole-disk encryption for both the start-up and external disks, a wipe capability for all data, a revamped Mail client offering enhanced message threading, the ability to open applications and their documents where you left off when you restart the Mac, support for iOS-style gestures throughout the OS and applications, and a navigation tool for applications and documents called Mission Control.

Developers can also create sandboxed apps for greater security, as well as add in-application purchases to programs delivered through the Mac App Store. Schiller says Lion comes with 3,000 new APIs.

ITV were not available for comment on the rationale behind this move at the time of writing.

The Macs will be rolled out to staff over the next 18 months.

The broadcaster has also announced plans for the roll out of web-based collaboration tool Google Apps.

The product will see ITV move to a series of cloud services provided by the web giant, including Google Mail with integrated IM (Google Talk), Google Calendar, Google Docs (allowing users to create, edit and share documents, presentations and spreadsheets in real time), Google Sites and Google Video for Business.

The broadcaster will also adopt Google Chrome as its standard browser.

Paul Dale, chief technology officer said in a statement: "When I arrived at ITV, one of my tasks was to implement a company-wide plan for workplace technology in order to enable our staff to deliver ITV's Transformation Plan."

Robert Whiteside, head of Google Enterprise for the UK, Ireland and Benelux, said: "Leading businesses are waking up to the benefits of cloud computing. Going forward, most innovation will happen on the web and businesses that understand this will be best positioned to grow and succeed."