Corporate users seek move to Windows 7, but planning incomplete

A large number of companies plan to move to Windows 7, but many of them have no solid plans for when they will do it, according to a recent Forrester survey.

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The issue is one of preparation to accommodate the new operating system, which shipped Thursday to consumers but has been available to volume licensing customers since late August.

"There is a lot of work to get your applications and hardware compatible with the new operating system … especially for organizations that support XP and did not do a lot of application compatibility testing when Vista was released," says Benjamin Gray, the Forrester analyst who conducted the survey with 653 PC decision-makers at North American and European enterprises and small-to-midsize businesses.

The survey shows that 66% of companies plan to move to Win 7, but of those companies, a whopping 49% say they have no specific migration plans yet.

"I suspect most of those organizations are in the relatively early stages of application compatibility testing and remediation and they are determining if it will be 12, 16 or 18 months to get there. But as soon as they are ready they are going to move to Windows 7," Gray says.

Steve Kleynhans, an analyst with Gartner, says users in the evaluation stage should think about including 64-bit testing. Win 7 supports both 32-bit and 64-bit processors.

"The bottom line is that at some point in the next five years you very likely will be moving to a 64-bit operating environment and Windows 7 may be the right time to make the move," Kleynhans wrote in his blog. "At the very least everyone should include one 64-bit environment in their testing matrix. While it may not be the right time to make the move, it is certainly the right time to start preparing for the inevitable 64-bit shift."

Gartner polled 400 attendees to one of its recent Webcasts and found 34% planned to mostly deploy 32-bit, while 13% were planning mostly on 64-bit. The other 52% were undecided.

Forrester's Gray says there are a number of wild cards that could influence the ebb and flow of upgrades. He thinks the vast majority of upgrades will tie into the natural PC refresh cycle, "so if users are not buying PCs they will not be buying Windows 7."

Gartner predicts that Win 7 will have minimal impact on worldwide PC sales from October through December.

In addition, Gray says organizations that are embracing Windows Server 2008 R2 are likely to move faster to Win 7 in order to take advantage of features that work with the server such as Branch Cache and Direct Access. 

"The vast majority of organizations we have spoken with are simply building the business case without Windows 7, but there is a better story with the two together," Gray says.

While the Forrester survey showed only 9% of users on Vista, 62% of those users said they plan to upgrade to Win 7. In comparison, 61% of XP users said they planned to make the switch. Those XP users will be under the gun as independent software vendors will begin to eliminate support for XP on new versions or upgrades to their software over the next few years and by the fact that extended support for XP expires in April 2014.

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