Vista Adoption: Who's Taking The Plunge?

HURDLES TO ADOPTION
There are stiff challenges partners know they must overcome to convince their customers to move over to Vista.

For enterprises, platform stability was the No. 1 reason IT buyers gave for delaying Vista adoption, cited by more than half of respondents as a "highly influential" factor in delaying adoption. Application compatibility and migration cost and impact followed as No. 2 and No. 3, respectively.

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In the SMB, the top three concerns leading to adoption delays were migration cost and impact, cost of associated hardware and application compatibility, in that order.

Although some vendors have earned Microsoft's "Works with Vista" or "Certified for Vista" stamp of approval on new products, the vast majority of application developers—especially those serving corporate customers—won't make their updates available until the second half of 2007. Once many of these issues are resolved, the migration will begin, partners say.

"Because we deal with mostly small businesses, we are on hold waiting for antivirus, backup, and other vendors to get their products fully ready for Vista," said Jason Harrison, president of Harrison Technology Consulting, Nashville, N.C. "We will be holding off on anything new, OS upgrade or new systems for Vista, until all third-party support is there."

Kerry Mann, president of Mantralogix, a 12-person Microsoft solution provider in Ontario, said the bulk of his midmarket customers will begin moving as soon as leading midmarket applications are updated for Vista.

"None of the clients that use desktops to run mission-critical applications like ERP or CRM can go to Vista right now because most software publishers aren't ready," said Mann. "We're going to see adoption start happening and the ability to push people in that direction in the last quarter of 2007 and first quarter of 2008, when the maintenance releases and patches are ready."

As in other Microsoft product upgrade cycles, the release of the first Service Pack is more influential for Vista adoption in the SMB market. It was cited by 61 percent of solution provider respondents as being partly or highly influential in determining when their customers would upgrade to Vista. Evolve's Sobel said he expects his Vista business to accelerate once the Vista Service Pack and all the third-party drivers are released.

Analysts said these releases are pivotal.

"SMB customers care more about the timing of the release of Vista SP1 because it's the 'all clear' sign from Microsoft," said Walter Pritchard, a senior analyst at Cowen & Co., San Francisco. "The second half of 2007 and first half of 2008 is when a lot of companies will get started, and that's when the application publishers will come out with Vista-compatible code."

The Cowen analyst agreed that SMB customers will adopt Vista faster than large corporations because they have fewer applications to test and generally use off-the-shelf applications from Microsoft, Intuit and Adobe and other ERP, CRM and vertical applications. Enterprise customers, in contrast, run many complex custom applications and must test them for months and sometimes years before safely deploying an OS upgrade, he said.

"I think most businesses will probably upgrade through the OEM channel when they replace hardware," said Tim Long, owner and technology consultant at TiGra Networks, Great Britain. "At this moment in time, Windows Vista is an awkward fit on an SBS network and requires careful management. But I am confident that the SBS team will rectify that soon. I currently have one customer with 10 PCs that is considering a complete hardware refresh that would incorporate Vista."

NEXT: Under the hood of Vista