Skip Vista, target Windows 7, says Gartner

BANGALORE, INDIA: Gartner Inc, a leading information technology research and advisory organization, recently released an analysis saying that the Windows 7 Release will affect Vista deployment Plans.

Skip Vista and target Windows 7, says the leading research analyst firm to the businesses.

Preparing for Vista will require the same amount of effort as preparing for Windows 7, so at this point, targeting Windows 7 would add less than six months to the schedule and would result in a plan that is more politically palatable, better for users, and results in greater longevity.

According to the news analysis by Michael A. Silver and Stephen Kleynhans, organizations with a Windows Vista project well underway should stay the course, but most others should target Windows 7.

Organizations in the midst of a Vista deployment should continue with Vista, but plan to switch to Windows 7 in late 2010 or early 2011, especially if business are switching to Vista through a hardware refresh.

Organizations planning for Vista should consider switching to Windows 7 if it would delay deployment by six months or less.

The further you are with your Vista plans, the more sense it makes to continue, said the analyst firm.

The report said Windows 7 includes new features that will attract organizations such as BranchCache, which would reduce time users in small, often serverless locations wait to download files from remote servers, by caching previously accessed content locally in the branch network and AppLocker, which would allow organizations to more effectively control what applications users may run.

Both of these will require Windows 7 Enterprise Edition, available only to organizations with Software Assurance, or Windows 7 Ultimate.

However, with more than half of the organizations planning to skip Vista, most organizations will have to move to Windows 7 to maintain a supportable environment as Windows XP ages, it added.

Gartner advises the organizations to move off of Windows XP by YE12 to avoid application support problems, even though Microsoft will support Windows XP into April 2014.

Though the vast majority of applications that are compatible with Vista will run on Windows 7, organizations need to ensure that vendors will support their applications running on the new operating system. Between waiting for vendor support and testing, planning, preparing and piloting, few organizations will be able to begin large-scale production deployments until 12 to 18 months after the RTM, in late 2010 or early 2011. Consumers and small and midsize businesses are more likely to run what ships on new PCs, so they will be early adopters of Windows 7.

Recently, as per the media reports, Microsoft itself had urged the organizations to dump Vista deployment plans and shift to Windows 7.

During last week's keynote address at the TechEd 2009 conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft senior vice president Bill Veghte said that corporate customers who had just started exploring deploying Vista should hold off and wait for Windows 7, which he said Microsoft would ship in time for the holiday season.