VARs Ready To Run With Vista But See Some Obstacles

BitLocker is a big cost saver because it prevents would-be thieves or hackers from getting into the hard drive of a lost or stolen PC. That makes it less costly to secure corporate data and achieve compliance, while also making it far easier for IT administrators and partners to get end users back up and running, Nicholls said.

Moreover, tools that ease desktop deployment, image management benefits and enhanced diagnostics will help reduce ongoing maintenance costs, Nicholls added. Vista is much better at diagnosing and resolving connectivity issues than in the past, he said.

"About 30 percent of the IT budget is for deployment and distribution of new systems, while the other 70 percent is for ongoing maintenance," Nicholls said. It's far easier to support, and end users can resolve problems. Vista will reduce baseline costs in help desk, maintenance and security. Security is the No. 1 thing to reduce costs."

The downside to Vista? In most cases, Vista will require a hardware refresh that will delay rollouts, according to Nicholls.

"Vista isn't a lean creature, and it needs serious resources to run on, especially if you turn on the new interface," he said. "This is the one thing that could delay Vista because companies may want the features but may not want to do a hardware rollout right now."

Tyson Hartman, CTO of Avanade, a joint services venture of Microsoft and Accenture, agreed that great improvements in usability, security and manageability will make Vista a compelling upgrade for most enterprises. He has been working with seven early Vista adopters as part of the TAP program.

Hartman and others, though, believe that lingering application compatibility issues will slow adoption. Although ISVs and hardware vendors have begun to ramp up their Vista driver development, it will take some time before all applications and hardware devices are Vista-compatible, and even longer for third-party products to be optimized to take advantage of Vista's .Net 3.0 Web service, presentation and workflow foundations.

Hartman said he's advising his customers to embark on a lengthy planning and testing cycle of all their internally developed applications before deploying Vista. "There will be applications that will be problematic amid changes in security and access that initially people will not appreciate, even though it's making the desktop more secure," he said. "It's another reason enterprises will adopt it at a slower pace, to fully assess their own software applications."

Both Hartman and Getronics' Nicholls pointed out that in Vista Microsoft has integrated several deployment tools and a business desktop deployment solution that partners can use to ease that process. Microsoft also has provided an application compatibility tool kit that customers can use to test in-house applications.

And as a final resort, partners can deploy virtualization software from Microsoft and other vendors, such as Virtual PC Express and Softricity -- to help customers experiment with Vista on Windows XP machines and migrate current workloads to Vista PCs to ensure business continuity during Vista rollouts.

Tyson and others also noted that solution providers and application developers can tap into Vista's .Net 3.0 Web service, workflow and graphics subsystems to enable a new generation of Web 2.0 applications. But that won't happen just yet.

"Customers are just beginning to understand all the capabilities of .Net 3.0 and WinFX. We have early adopters interested in workflow, communications foundation and the Aero interface, but it will take some time," Avanade's Hartman said. "To take advantage of the translucence and depth and pseudo 3-D usability experience means you might have to make changes to your apps to take advantage of .Net 3.0."

But some partners are already jumping on that opportunity. Notion Solutions, a Microsoft custom application solution provider in Irving, Texas, has invested roughly $40,000 to train its developers on Vista's .Net 3.0 programming model, formerly known as WinFX.

Chris Menegay, president of Notion Solutions, said applications will drive Vista adoption. The company expects to reap as much as $500,000 in new business next year because of its ability to develop corporate applications that use Vista's new vector-based graphics, service-oriented architecture and workflow features.

"We expect many customers will want to use the new tools of .Net 3.0 and Vista to solve problems that previously were much more complex," Menegay said. "Since we write custom applications for our customers, the Vista sale comes from the killer app that requires it. Unless a customer is intending to immediately roll out Vista for security or other reasons, the adoption will be gradual. First, we see the development teams using it to build the next generation of applications, and then the users of those applications will be migrated to Vista, and eventually entire companies."