News

Survey: IT Pros in No Hurry to Deploy Vista

Concerns about Vista have many considering other operating systems

• By Kurt Mackie
• 02/21/2008

Migration to the Windows Vista operating system isn't generating much enthusiasm among IT personnel in the enterprise, according to the results of a survey conducted in November 2007 by King Research. The study by the market research firm found that "90 percent of participants have concerns about the migration to Windows Vista."

What's worse, from Microsoft's perspective, is that future plans to deploy Vista seem stunted. Roughly half (53 percent) of respondents said that they "have no plans to deploy Vista at this time." Other plans for Vista included installing it for testing (18 percent), new machines only (14 percent), and other uses (two percent). Just 13 percent said they planned to be fully deployed on Vista.

The report, Windows Vista Adoption and Alternatives: A Survey of Technology Professionals, was sponsored by KACE Networks, a systems management appliances provider that, among other things, can help with Vista migration.

The survey was conducted by e-mail, tapping the responses of "front-line IT professionals" (managers responsible for teams of IT professionals) and "IT executives,".

According to Diane Hagglund, a King Research analyst, "This topic was fairly compelling," she said in a Webinar with KACE, presented on Feb. 13. "We were anticipating, based on the audience that we e-mailed, that we would get about 250 to 300 complete [surveys], and we actually found that we had three times that amount at 961 IT professionals completing the survey."

The survey asked participants if they had "considered the possibility of deploying any non-Windows operating system as an alternative to adopting Windows Vista." It turned out that 44 percent of participants said that they were.

"I was shocked by this answer," Hagglund commented.

The Windows OS replacement that respondents mentioned most was Macintosh (28 percent), followed by Red Hat Linux (23 percent), SuSE Linux (18 percent), Ubuntu (18 percent), and other Linux (nine percent). Four percent weren’t sure.

However, respondents indicated that they might have problems making the switch because of perceived difficulties in managing non-Windows OSes.

The survey included a question that made the case for KACE. It asked respondents if a single system management interface to handle multiple OSes would be beneficial; 89 percent said Yes. The respondents did not know that KACE was the study's sponsor.

The full report is available for free at the Dell KACE Web site, with user registration required.