IT managers continue to resist Vista deployment 29 July, 2008 By Erin Bell

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When the first survey polled more than 1,000 IT professionals in November, 2007, 53 percent of respondents said they had no plans to deploy Vista at the time. When the second survey revisited the question last month, the number had actually risen to 60 percent.

Almost all of the respondents (92 percent) said the release of Vista Service Pack 1 had not changed their deployment plans.

The study's author, Diane Hagglund of King Research, said that when she was originally commissioned by systems management appliance company KACE to do the follow-up study this year, she was expecting that companies would have eventually overcome the natural resistance to change and simply deployed Vista anyway as time went on.

"What's been so interesting to me doing this two-parter is that that's not the direction that people seem to be going with Vista," she said.

Respondents' primary concern with deploying Vista was its compatibility with required business software, followed by performance issue (such as boot time and speed), the need for users to adapt to a new interface, stability, cost and security.

In light of the survey's findings, Hagglund said it's an important for channel partners to have conversations with their customers about where they're sitting on the issue of Vista deployment and operating systems.

"It's an important time to understand how they're viewing their Windows deployments in terms of sticking with Vista, going somewhere else, or not doing anything. Channel partner serving those customers really need to not assume anything."

"This delay in Vista adoption is leaving the window open longer for Mac and Linux to sneak onto the corporate desktop," said Rob Meinhardt, co-founder and CEO of KACE.

According to the survey, Mac was the most likely operating system to be deployed in place of Vista (29 percent), followed by Red Hat Linux (24 percent), Ubuntu (21 percent), SUSE Linux (15 percent), and other versions of Linux (7 percent). A further 28 percent said they planned to skip Vista altogether and wait for its successor, Windows 7.

Hagglund said that switching to Linux or Mac is a very strategic decision. Companies who switch to these platforms are typically intending to make a big change anyway, and Vista can simply serve as the deciding factor.

"If you're consulting with a client and talking about migrating to Vista, now's a great time to throw 'well maybe we should consider Linux or Macintosh' into the mix," said Hagglund. "But obviously it has to meet the needs of the client, and for some clients it's not an option."

Hagglund made it clear that even though some organizations are switching, Windows is still clearly a dominant operating system, as far as no channel partner is going to go out of business just because they're a Microsoft reseller.

But Hagglund did stress that it's important for partners to keep track of what's going on in the market.

"Demand is not increasing because of Vista, it's decreasing, and so it's time for channel partners to make sure that the mix that they're offering their customers is still compelling and is going to meet their own growth targets," said Hagglund. "It may be time to think of extending their portfolio to support other operating systems."

Hagglund added that staying with Windows XP is another viable option -- at least for the time being. "It's clearly an operating system that [Microsoft] is continuing to support, and we're seeing the market dictating that they're going to have to continue to support it. So certainly counselling your clients to stick with XP is a very reasonable option."