European businesses hold back on Vista deployment

Microsoft Windows Vista is heading users' way in a matter of weeks, but its arrival may be met with more silence than the software giant expects as 54 per cent of European businesses surveyed by a leading analyst aren't planning on deploying it.

What's more, of those who have decided Vista is for them, just six per cent are planning on making the move within six months of its release.

Some 18 per cent of organisations say they will deploy the long-awaited operating system (OS) within one year, while one fifth plan to wait up to two years before implementation, according to the research conducted by Forrester Research.

Users have been waiting a number of years for Windows XP's successor to arrive and, until recently, a great deal of uncertainty surrounded its launch date.

Forrester's report, The State Of Enterprise Infrastructure In Europe 2006, surveyed more than 1,000 decision makers in North American and European enterprises, some 215 of which responded to the Vista question.

The research found that most companies are still managing a mixed OS environment, with 35 per cent of Windows-based PCs still running either Windows 2000 or an older generation of the OS.

"This [takeup] is behind the anticipated rate of adoption in North America, reflecting greater resistance to the Microsoft product strategy from users in the European market. As Microsoft fine-tunes the OS ahead of the final release and IT developers get a chance to evaluate and test a nearly complete product, confidence in the security and usability features should rise."

Forrester's research also looked at the IT trends and priorities likely to take shape over the next year.

It revealed that technology spending will be dominated by server and PC purchases, with more than half of hardware budgets dedicated to these areas.

Consolidation, disaster recovery and security remain at the top of the agenda priority-wise, according to the report.

Many businesses are expected to increasingly turn to server and storage virtualisation as a way of simplifying the complexity of their infrastructure.

Some 23 per cent of businesses surveyed are already embracing server virtualisation, while 12 per cent and 16 per cent are either piloting it or interested in it respectively.

However, despite the obvious benefits, almost a quarter of companies are unaware of virtualisation, with a further 38 per cent remaining oblivious to the merits of computing grid technology.

"The higher adoption rate of server virtualisation shows it has more applicability to the needs of enterprises than grid computing, but vendors still have their marketing work cut out for them to raise the rates of awareness and interest," said Forrester analyst Frank Gillett.

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