Customers ready to embrace Vista, expect hardware upgrades

More than four out of five IT decision makers surveyed said they expect to adopt Windows Vista and about one in five plans to roll out the Microsoft software in the next 12 months.

This bodes well not just for Microsoft, but for hardware vendors, according to a poll of 761 IT decision makers by technology supplier CDW (Be prepared to share some of your info with the company if you want to see the complete survey here). That's because half the respondents say at least half of their computing hardware would require an upgrade to support the operating system. A quarter of state and local government IT pros said most of their hardware would need a boost to handle Vista.

Microsoft recently released Vista to manufacturing and plans a launch event Nov. 30.

Vista's perceived security improvements over earlier versions of Windows is a big driver behind customer support for the new operating system, with increased performance being a big factor as well, the survey found.

One in five people surveyed said their organizations are using or evaluating a Windows Vista pre-release, and most of them said their initial impressions are favorable.