Another View of Vista Business Adoption

Joe Wilcox Earlier today, direct-marketing reseller CDW released survey results indicating that many businesses will take the slow road to Windows Vista adoption. The majority of surveyed IT managers indicated their businesses would need to make costly hardware upgrades--presumably new PC purchases--to support Microsoft's flagship operating system.

While CDW put a positive spin on the numbers--proclaiming that "86 percent of respondents plan to upgrade to Vista"--the overall response forebodes business upgrade plans. Twenty percent of survey respondents "would start deployment" within 12 months, said Terry Fink, CDW manager of marketing development.

Starting deployment is a long way from actually moving Windows Vista to production systems.

CDW commissioned Walker Interactive, which surveyed 761 IT managers from all size businesses and government and educational institutions, for the study. Respondents "identified themselves as being somewhat familiar with Windows Vista," which potentially skews the findings. "Somewhat" is somewhat vague, and Windows Vista familiarity means the survey may have overlooked IT managers unfamiliar with the operating system. Now, what do they plan to do about Windows Vista?

Only 2 percent of surveyed IT managers had a "detailed scheduled plan," with another 24 percent either with a tentative plan or one in the making. "Virtually everybody needs a plan," said Fink. Seventy-nine percent of respondents--IT managers familiar with Windows Vista--had yet to evaluate any pre-release version of the operating system.

Good news for CDW and other channel partners selling hardware: 51 percent of surveyed IT managers said their organization would need to upgrade or replace half their systems to "become Vista compatible." However, the news isn't as good for Microsoft, if businesses invest in new hardware before moving to Windows Vista. Today, eWeek Security Center Editor Larry Seltzer gave some reasons why many businesses would need to upgrade hardware to run Windows Vista.

Microsoft is decidedly optimistic about upgrade intentions. From a spokesperson statement today: "Businesses typically bring new operating systems into their environments more slowly than consumers, but we think businesses will adopt Windows Vista faster than any previous operating system...We're seeing a great deal of demand from businesses for a new operating system that addresses their evolving needs, which is why we say Windows Vista will be the fastest adopted operating system by businesses ever. The report announced by CDW today appears to support these projections."

Microsoft will officially launch Windows Vista for businesses in 17 days, and it's reasonable to ask what IT organization would test and deploy Windows Vista over the holidays. To that question Gartner analyst Michael Silver answered, "Only the die hards." He added: "The people who need to get off Windows 2000 will be in the labs [over the holidays]." Gartner recently conducted an informal survey assessing businesses' Windows Vista adoption plans. Most IT managers said they would move Windows Vista to end-user production systems starting in fourth quarter 2007. However, IT managers from larger enterprises indicated second quarter 2008.