By Dominic Maher, 21 February 2000 00:30
NEWS Large companies migrating to Windows 2000 will face a tough time, according to a senior Gartner Group analyst. Ed Thompson, a research director at Gartner, said: "A company with more than 50,000 users wanting to run the operating system on everything from desktops to notebooks will face a bill of around £85m to do so." He added that anyone who has recently moved to NT 4 would be "nuts" to move to Microsoft's latest offering because they would never get their money back. But Oliver Roll, director of business marketing at Microsoft, said: "This is typical. Analysts take the worse case scenario and turn it into actual analysis." He said the vast majority of customers would face no price changes due to a three-year enterprise agreement. "This guarantees no change in pricing. If you upgrade you will actually see a 20 per cent reduction in pricing," said Roll. But with the operating systems forever evolving, Roll said: "Customers will always upgrade in a three-year cycle. Those who deployed NT in 1997 or 1998 are now moving to Windows 2000." But, Thompson gave a warning to all corporates. He said: "Small customers will have a relatively easy time but large customers will have the toughest."
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