"They can't have people going to the mall [and the Apple store there] to get technical support," DiDio argued.

Apple will need to make a decision soon, said DiDio, whether to explicitly market its machines to business, or continue its hands-off attitude. "They've been taking a wait-and-see approach this year, and not publicly said what their strategy is going to be, or if they even have a strategy," she said.

Elsewhere in her survey results, DiDio reported that nearly half of the IT managers said that they planned to increase integration with other Apple consumer-oriented products, .

"Apple has always been considered a 'cool' company, what with its iPod and iPhone," said DiDio. "But at the same time, this move [into enterprises] is not just a coincidence. Apple has been very vocal about things like the Safari browser and vocal about advanced features and functions of the Mac OS that matter to business, like desktop search and automatic backup.

"I think this is just the cusp of this trend," she concluded.