ARC OS: Study Says Win2000 Rollouts Slow, But Sure

Complex. Slow. Expensive. Lengthy. Painful. This is not how any developer wants its software migration described, but this is how corporate customers described their Windows 2000 migration in a Giga Information Group July 2000 report by analyst Laura DiDio, tracking Windows 2000 adoption at large corporations. The Cambridge, Mass.-based information services firm interviewed some 50 early adopters, each of which had between 10,000 and 20,000 desktops in multiple locations.The study found that companywide rollouts, particularly of Windows 2000 Server, took six to nine months longer than planned.

This didn't surprise some corporate adopters. Wells Fargo, for example, is committed to a long, slow implementation. After spending 18 months participating in Microsoft's Joint Development Program, the diversified San Francisco-based financial services company has deployed Active Directory on 28 Eight-Way servers located in eight geographic sites. This represents one element of the first phase of a three-phase implementation that will migrate 120,000 user accounts to Active Directory and the infrastructure to Windows 2000 Server and Professional, company executives say. Wells Fargo plans to complete the implementation by the end of 2001.

Anything less than a well-planned, careful implementation will be fraught with costly errors and wasted company time, Giga cautions. In fact, upgrading Windows is more difficult than upgrading a Unix network or advancing from Novell's NetWare 4.x to 5.x, the report warns.

"The complexity of the [Windows 2000] technology and a customer's ability to ferret out and correctly implement the necessary third-party management packages and third-party storage, performance-monitoring and security tools, is a far more protracted and torturous process than most organizations dreamed. Reality does bite. And bite hard," DiDio says.

Despite such complexities, more than 80 percent of corporate customers polled over the past six months say that Windows 2000's power, security, scalability and reliability make the difficult adoption experience worthwhile, Giga reports.

"The adoption costs aren't much more than deploying another NT 4.0 Master User Domain. There are some additional costs in hardware and training but [they are] well worth the long-term investment," says Scott Hall, a Wells Fargo enterprise engineering manager.