NEWS
Time and complexity are putting UK IT managers off migrating their organisation onto Microsoft's Vista operating system.
New research has found nearly half of IT managers (49 per cent) will take more than 12 months to fully migrate their organisation onto Vista - once preparation, testing, rollout and post-migration issues have all been taken into account.
David Bradshaw analyst at Ovum told silicon.com: "It is a big project to go onto Vista. I'm not entirely surprised by [the research]. That's the kind of timescale I would expect."
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A further 45 per cent say the whole process would take six months or more, with just six per cent saying the process would take less then three months.
Just three per cent of respondents said they are planning to migrate their corporate systems onto Vista immediately.
As well as time, the sheer complexity of migration was cited by 62 per cent of IT managers as putting them off a move to Vista.
The research also shows IT staff are concerned about post migration issues such as downtime - leading to loss of productivity - and user questions about personal settings or applications wasting support staff time.
Because of this, Bradshaw suggested, IT departments may wait for staff to start using Vista at home to reduce the number of user issues emerging following migration. However, some companies such as Tesco.com have already taken the plunge and migrated to Vista.
The research was carried out by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Enteo Software and covered 100 IT managers from companies of 1,000 employees or more.
Comments
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1. Brian Murray
Anyone else tired of this déjà vu?
Everytime the IT community is held to ransom by a new software release we see this pain barrier being crossed.
When will we learn to bite the bullet and invest in technologies and approaches which make us more resilient to these predictable environment refreshes.
There are plenty tools out these to assist in proving, updating and accepting new releases but most dumbfounding to me on this particular front is why we still cling to the thick client desktop and multiply our pain points by 100s or even 1000s?
A thin client approach is not new, its proven and cost effective.
Why manage transition on a user-by-user basis as a 'all change from today' crisis, when we can allow users to change gradually between the two environments (only transitioning the backend infrastructure)?
It doesn't eradicate the problem, but it certainly eases the symptoms.
2. anonymous
Can someone please tell me why I should migrate all the PC's within the company onto Vista. Surly the only people to profit from this is M$ from the cost (and HP from the new PC's that would be required). W2K works fine for what we need it to do!
3. Nick Cole
Does nobody learn?
This happens every time Microsoft comes up with their latest wizz-bang solve all problems if only you buy the latest --- solution.
They promise good security, hardly any bugs, talk about how much effort they spent on development, etc. And what happens within a short period? All the same old problems yet again.
Never mind the learning curve for everybody, poor documentation, having to second guess what changes have been made and how to make them, the list goes on an on! But then when have MS ever thought about their customers?
4. Ian Savell
The real story here is that Microsoft are only selling "more Vista than XP". That isn't replacing the installed base, even for new purchases people are still buying XP in large numbers. As I am. I have three test systems with Vista but as half my technical software won't run on Vista and my PC suppliers are happy to sell XP systems, even at a discount, I can't see a change happening soon.
And by the way, I PREFER Vista, I just can't use it until I can buy software to run on it!