Microsoft To Shell Out $1 Million To Lure Reluctant Businesses To Windows XP

Microsoft

At Gartner IT/Expo on Wednesday the company said it will underwrite business value studies for approximately 40 companies that have more than 5,000 PCs. With each study costing about $25,000, Microsoft's investment in the deal is over $1 million, officials said.

"It's pretty small; it's well under 10 percent" of the company's Windows desktop installed base of 250 million, said Rogers Weed, vice president of Windows client product management at Microsoft, when asked about the corporate adoption rate of Windows XP.

"How do we jump-start this thing? We're trying to kick-start some momentum. Businesses are leaving money on the table by not looking at this," he said.

The company said it expects additional XP deployments to be driven by the release of the first Windows XP Service Pack 1 last month.

Based on a new desktop evaluation method developed by Gartner, called Total Value of Opportunity (TVO), Windows XP provides customers with a return on investment of more than 200 percent and an annual savings of between $187 per desktop and $387 per laptop for mobile users over a three-year period. The TVO numbers were reviewed by BearingPoint, formerly KPMG Consulting.

Microsoft also claims that the XP's value of improved security and reliability averaged $93 per user while average annual management and maintenance costs decreased 51 percent.

Microsoft cited a Gartner report that estimates almost 75 percent of all commercial PCs would still be running Windows 9.x by the end of 2002.

According to a statement issued by the company, Siemens AG is one customer that has enjoyed significant cost savings by migrating more than 180,000 employees to Windows XP, while a smaller customer, Pella, is currently upgrading 2,200 desktops and laptops to Windows XP and Office XP. The company said it expects to enjoy $250,000 annually in cost savings for IT support and administration.

The deadline to sign up for one of the new business value studies is Nov. 1. As of 3 p.m. eastern standard time, 15 corporations from the United Kingdom expressed interest in signing up for the Microsoft-funded study, said Microsoft's Weed.