Vista Adoption Far From a Done Deal

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What a difference a few days can make.

Last week, analysis firm Forrester Research released a report suggesting deployments of Vista inside enterprises were about to take off after a year in the doldrums.

However, another analysis firm, King Research, on Monday released the results of its own survey, which shows 90 percent of IT staffers have concerns about migrating to Vista.

The newest report, which King conducted earlier this month for systems management appliance vendor KACE, also found that “44 percent of companies have considered deploying non-Windows operating systems to avoid Vista migration with 9 percent of those already in the process of switching.”

That’s a far cry from the Forrester report, which found that while only 2 percent of PCs in enterprises are running Vista so far, 7 percent of IT staffers have plans to begin deploying it by year’s end.

Additionally, the Forrester survey, which was conducted in spring, indicated that 32 percent expect to have deployments well underway by the end of 2008. Overall, the survey found that nearly 50 percent have concrete plans for Vista deployment.

Meanwhile, the King survey found that only 13 percent of respondents have firm plans to deploy Vista at all.

One factor in the surveys’ disagreement may be the long-awaited Service Pack 1 (SP1) update for Vista, which is due in the first quarter of 2008.

When discussing the seemingly slow uptake of Vista among enterprises so far, many analysts cite the conventional wisdom that businesses do not consider a new Windows release stable or bug-free until Microsoft releases its first Service Pack.

“That would certainly be in keeping with the old strategy that people tend to shy away from the first release of a Microsoft product,” Dwight Davis, vice president at researcher Ovum Summit, told InternetNews.com.

As a result, it’s unclear whether King’s survey respondents will revisit their opinion of Vista once SP1 is released. Microsoft issued a “preview” release candidate to about 15,000 testers last week.

King Research based its figures on a survey of 961 e-mailed responses from IT staffers that included a fairly even split between front-line IT professionals, IT managers, and IT executives. Forrester, in comparison, interviewed 565 PC decision-makers across North American and European enterprises.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.