by , 5:30 PM EDT, June 26th, 2008

The Yankee Group surveyed 700 Senior IT administrators and high level executives. Compared to the previous survey in 2006, the appearance of Macs in their companies jumped from 47 percent to 80 percent. That's despite the perception that Apple has done little to promote the Mac in the enterprise, according to Computerworld on Thursday.

"[In 2006] we were talking about onesies and twosies," said Laura DiDio, a research fellow at Yankee Group Research Inc. Overall market share in the enterprise was estimated at 8 to 10 percent in contrast to the 1-2 percent previously.

Ms. DiDio said that a number of the businesses they surveyed said that they now have 50, 100 or even several thousand Macs. [TMO notes that the existence if sites with more than a few thousands Macs is not new; some of the Federal Government's National Laboratories and Genentech fall into that category.]

One of the reasons for the increase, cited by the Yankee Group, is the ability of the Mac to run other OSes in virtualization. In fact, 28 percent of the sites surveyed said they were doing that.

The reliability of Apple hardware was also cited as a reason for adoption.

The Yankee Group also noted a change in the IT culture. "The difference now is that [the decision to admit Macs is] much more concerted and formalized," Ms. DiDio concluded. "People are making the choice to go with Apple -- not just to let it in, but that it's a viable choice."

Some may argue with the the perception that Apple has put "little to no official effort into that part of the market," in the words of Computerworld's Gregg Keizer. Apple has a pair of very ambitious and capable fields sales teams, the Federal, State and Local government teams and the Enterprise teams that aggressively sell to their clients. However, those field sales teams, each consisting of many hundreds of Apple employees located all over the U.S., are not widely reported on.