The deployment of Windows Vista among organizations is slowly gaining momentum, with 87 percent of the responding IT decision makers are starting to evaluate and deploy Windows Vista despite concern over perceived performance, patching and the operating system’s hardware requirements, according to a recent study.

The Vista Tracking Poll, the second conducted by CDW Corporation, provider of technology products and services, shows that nearly 30% of respondents are using or evaluating Vista. The first identical poll was done last November, the month the software shipped to corporate users.

The survey was conducted among businesses, state/local government agencies, K-12 education and higher-education institutions of which 753 IT decision makers responded.

The poll showed an 8% increase over the first poll in terms of deployments and evaluations of Vista by corporate users.

Since the first survey, 1 percent of respondents stating that their organizations have completed implementation already, and another 19 percent scheduled to complete implementation within the next 12 months.

The survey also found that 6% of organizations are implementing Vista on a schedule that extends beyond 12 months, and another 13 percent of responding organizations are not currently implementing, but plan to start in the next year. Including the number of currently unscheduled adoptions, fully 87 percent of responding IT decision makers’ state that their organizations will adopt Windows Vista.

“I don’t think we were surprised by any of the data,” says JoEllen Amato-Tuck, Microsoft brand manager for CDW. “It seems to be in line with what the first survey showed.”

The top five reasons for not adopting Vista were the expectation of bugs in the first release, satisfaction with a current operating system, unclear benefits from upgrading, concerns about hardware requirements, and lack of IT staff.

But the results indicate the organizations are overcoming the deployment barriers.

“The Second CDW Windows Vista Tracking Poll indicates that organizations are confronting and overcoming the barriers to adoption in increasingly complex and diverse computing environments,” said Harry J. Harczak, Jr., executive vice president of CDW Corporation. “Like any major system change, there is a curve for learning and leveraging new features and the new ways to access older features. Maintaining and increasing the pace of adoption will require Microsoft, industry partners and lead adopters to share best practices for implementing Vista smoothly and effectively.”

However, data also showed that between the first and second tracking poll, the number of respondents who have a “very favorable” opinion of Vista dropped from 14 percent to 12 percent, while those who have a “somewhat favorable” opinion of Vista sank from 56 percent to less than half, at 48 percent. The percentage of those who have a “somewhat unfavorable” opinion of Vista more than doubled, from 6 percent to 14 percent.

The company plans a third survey sometime between September and December. CDW says the tracking poll will show over time how evaluation variables and deployment strategies are progressing.

Related:

Windows 7 release announcement is bad for Vista

Avoid Vista, keep XP and wait for Windows 7?

Business loosing interest in Windows

Windows Vista gaining support in the business market

64-bit Windows Vista gaining momentum, now pre-installed on most PCs

Entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 10:21 pm under Upgrading, Vista.  Print This Post

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