By Simon Quicke27 August 2008
The long awaited embrace of Vista
by the business community appears to be picking up speed with more widespread
adoption of Microsoft’s most recent OS release.
According to its corporate desktop operating system trends
research for the fourth quarter of last year until the end of the second
quarter 2008 the tide is turning based on research from Forrester.
The analyst house has noticed an increase in deployment of Vista by companies as IT managers reach the decision to
deploy the OS in large numbers.
In the report Benjamin Gray, an analyst at Forrester points
out that it usually takes around 18 months for a major release to filter
through to the corporate world.
“IT operations
professionals need to prepare for a more decisive shift in their desktop
operating system strategy. Why now? Because Microsoft released Windows Vista to
the general public more than 18 months ago - which is typically how long IT
departments need to test their applications and hardware against any new OS,”
states the report.
The OS tracker goes on to add that there are a couple of
reasons why Vista should be deployed including: staying current with
Microsoft's and independent software vendors' support life cycles; help
minimise security, management, and productivity challenges; and to position the
business to eventually embrace "Windows 7".
John Tate, managing director at ChangeBASE, which
specialises in helping corporates move to Vista,
said that the barriers to adopting the OS had changed because transitioning had
become cheaper through automated tools.
“There have been two big blockers with the cost of the
hardware and application compatibility,” he added “But more people are
upgrading their machines so they are Vista ready and tools like ours have made
it automated and made solving compatibility problems much quicker.”
The slowness in the adoption of Vista
has been an issue that has dogged Microsoft since the high-profile launch and
caused problems for the channel that initially had ordered too many stocks.
