Business still cautious on Vista adoption

New research reveals caution on the part of enterprise IT departments to deploy Vista, despite having had some months to evaluate it and the migration path it offers.

In a update to research first conducted in May last year - a few months before Vista was launched to businesses and consumers alike - analyst firm, Forrester has found growing reluctance to adopt the latest version of the Microsoft Windows operating system (OS).

Indeed, the report states: "When it comes to Windows Vista, Microsoft's biggest competitor isn't Apple, Novell, Red Hat, or Ubuntu (just to name a few) - it's Microsoft itself," referring to the number of respondents unwilling to move away from an older, stable OS version or change the refresh lifecycle of its PC estate (which often run the latest OS versions).

The report, entitled "Things to consider when preparing for Windows Vista," found a lack of maturity in the product, as well as hardware and application compatibility issues were holding back more widespread enterprise Vista adoption.

In terms of maturity, the advent of Vista's first service pack (SP1) was seen by all 45 expert users interviewed to update last year's research as an indication that the OS would be ready for enterprise-scale deployment. This is despite the fact Microsoft only made pre-beta preview Vista SP1 code available to testers last week.

One interviewee, who is a desktop operations manager at an oil and gas enterprise, told Forrester that, even without ongoing merger activities, "we would still delay rolling out Vista". They added: "We typically like to wait for SP1 to be released before we get too serious about a new OS."

But Microsoft would only go so far at the launch of the SP1 preview as to say Vista SP1 would ship sometime in the early part of next year.

The report also said that IT managers were waiting for the arrival of System Centre Configuration Manager 2007 to support multiple deployment scenarios and give IT flexibility when deploying Windows Vista into the enterprise. But this is also not scheduled for release until later this summer.

Forrester did say, however, that the drivers for migration were compelling and address the demand for better security, reliability and performance.

For example, the report author and Forrester analyst, Benjamin Gray wrote: "Make no mistake: the [User Account Control and BitLocker Drive Encryption] security features are a significant improvement over Windows 2000 and XP." But he adds: "They will also take IT more time to enable, configure, and manage."

Despite the seeming reluctance to migrate away from older versions of the OS, Forrester advises IT departments to start preparing for Vista regardless of their deployment schedules, given the fact that Microsoft has outlined plans to end support for Windows 2000 and XP by 2009 and 2014 respectively.

Specifically, Gray said: "Understand that there's little need to wait for SP1 to begin your application and hardware compatibility testing. SP1 will not offer new features and should not affect the compatibility of your line-of-business applications with Windows Vista."

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