Vista Adoption: Who's Taking The Plunge?

Seventy billion dollars. That's what Microsoft says its partners will generate in Vista-related product and service sales this year. It's a big number, and it helps paint a rosy picture of the opportunity out there for Microsoft's first new operating system in five years.

But the real picture is a complicated one, according to the Vista Adoption Study recently conducted by CRN and research firm Cowen & Co., in which CRN surveyed 170 solution providers about the SMB market and Cowen surveyed 238 enterprise IT buyers.

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For instance, there's a striking similarity among the Vista adoption drivers in the SMB and enterprise markets, but even though enterprise adoption rates are expected to lag those in the SMB, more than one-third of solution providers surveyed don't expect Vista adoption among their small-businesses customers to begin until at least next year. Another 15 percent don't know when their customers will begin installing Vista.

Like enterprises, SMB customers are most interested in Vista's security, mobility/networking and manageability improvements, survey respondents said. But what will jump-start use of the software upgrade in the SMB sector later this year won't be the new OS's features, partners said. It'll be normally scheduled hardware replacements, availability of Microsoft's first Vista Service Pack and more third-party Vista drivers.

"Most customers indicate they are planning to wait awhile before upgrading to Vista," said Larry Allen, business development manager at NetCom Systems, a Roswell, Ga., Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. "New hardware purchases and application compatibility or improvements will drive the move."

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Yet, Vista adoption will certainly take off faster in the SMB market than the enterprise, according to the study. Only 16 percent of enterprise IT buyers expect to adopt Vista in the second half of the year, compared with 33 percent in the SMB, survey respondents said. And in the first half of 2008, only 18 percent of enterprise IT buyers said they would be adopting Vista vs. 29 percent in the SMB.

"Enterprises will wait a year. My first deployments will be in April and May," said David Sobel, president and CEO of Evolve Technologies, a Fairfax, Va., Microsoft Gold Certified Partner who expects half of his enterprise customers will have Vista on their PCs next year. "It will be a bell curve through mid-2008."

It's typical for smaller companies to start migrating to new operating systems faster than large corporations because they have fewer applications to test. In this particular upgrade cycle, there are also additional issues to factor in: Hardware costs could stall some adoption, but pent-up demand for PCs (due to Vista's five-year development process), healthier IT budgets and easier desktop migration features for Vista are expected to accelerate the pace of upgrades for all SMBs.

Michael Cocanower, president of IT Synergy, a Microsoft solution provider in Phoenix, said he expects business will take off once ISVs release their Vista drivers. "I think most of these issues will be worked out by the second half," he said. "In general, what we are seeing is not a large upgrade or migration trend but, rather, I think small businesses will start purchasing new PCs with Vista in the second half [of 2007]," he said. "That trend will certainly continue into next year."

NEXT: Hurdles to adoption