Gartner: Postponing Upgrades Won't Cut Costs

Those costs may not be immediately noticed however--past the typical three-year depreciation mark, the firm found, desktop overhead shifts from hardware, software and IT (services) labor to indirect costs including lost productivity and downtime.

Equally important--and equally likely to be overlooked--are the business and productivity benefits derived from faster and newer PCs for high-performance employees.

What's needed, in the view of Gartner analyst Michael Silver, is not only a better understanding of desktop PC TCO, but also a more refined sense of those factors not quantifiable as part of hardware ownership costs, as well as what part of the enterprise pays those costs.

For Gartner's research note, "Desktop TCO for Years 4, 5 and 6: Someone Has To Pay," Silver found that the average annual TCO was the same for a PC kept for three years as one kept in service for four-to-six years. The difference is that in a three-year cycle the enterprise absorbs the costs; beyond that, the costs more directly affect end users in terms of lost productivity, PC downtime and increased need for software support versus newer machines.

"Longer lifecycle PCs don't show a huge jump in hardware breakdowns," Silver said, "but as users keep machines longer, they put more material on them creating more likely sources for conflict, more need for support."

Other overlooked costs of longer lifecycles include greater hardware and operating system diversity throughout the organization, furthering the chances of conflicts and increased demand on the support labor pool.

Operating system migration, too, must be considered to derive an accurate sense of the PCs lifetime cost. When considering operating systems, Silver cautioned, timing of purchase can play a large factor.

A Windows XP-based PC purchased in, for example, 2001 with a planned four-to-five-year replacement cycle would likely retain the original operating system throughout its lifetime, avoiding migration costs.

"A PC bought in 2004 for the same lifecycle would present a different challenge," Silver said. "Business needs to factor the probability of an operating system migration into their calculations of the PC's TCO."

As IT departments know all too well from the past few years, those planned lifecycles can span widely varying economic conditions, and these too should be factored into the TCO equation. Silver recommended adding longer PC retention possibilities into enterprise hardware investment calculations, including OS migration costs, increased levels of service and other factors beyond the initial depreciation period in case economic conditions require keeping existing PCs in place longer than planned.

Cost factors cut the other way as well, Gartner said. "If an end-user can find real business benefit in having a faster or newer PC, enterprises should quantify those benefits and build a business case to reduce the lifecycle toward three years," said analyst Leslie Fiering.

Bottom-line recommendations from Gartner included a four-year desktop PC replacement cycle for mainstream knowledge workers, with a three-year cycle for high performance users.

Longer than four-year turns were recommended only for fixed-function, limited application PCs, particularly those in locked-down environments such as call centers, where employees are unlikely to add their own material to the machine.

This story courtesy of TechWeb.