News

Survey: Half 'Have No Plans' To Deploy Vista

Migration to the Windows Vista operating system apparently isn't generating much enthusiasm among IT personnel in the enterprise.

• By Kurt Mackie
• February 15, 2008

What's worse, from Microsoft's perspective, is that future plans to deploy Vista seemed stunted too. 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 company that provides systems management appliances that, among other things, can help with things like 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," for a total of more than 900 participants, 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 indeed considering a non-Windows alternative.

"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), other Linux (nine percent) and not sure (four percent).

However, respondents seemed to indicate 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 and 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, although it requires user registration.