Avoid 'clean break' Vista upgrade - Gartner

Rather than trying to migrate all your users in one go, a phased approach to Microsoft's new OS may actually prove more cost effective, according to analyst house Gartner.

Speaking at the Gartner Midsize Enterprise Summit in Paris, Gartner principal research analyst Annette Jump told the audience of IT professionals the widely held view that supporting multiple operating systems is costly and complex is not an absolute truth.

She said: "How do you move to Vista? Generally the conventional wisdom suggests supporting all users on one operating system is cheaper than multiple systems but that doesn't include the cost of getting to one operating system. For around 60 per cent of large enterprises, managed diversity makes sense."

Jump outlined a staggered migration path for a typical organisation that was using 50 per cent Windows 2000 and 50 per cent XP in 2004. By 2005 the company should have migrated to 25 per cent Windows 2000 and 75 per cent Windows XP. 2006 should see the company using 100 per cent XP which will continue until the end of 2007. Then by 2008, the company should be looking to use around 75 per cent XP and 25 per cent Vista.

Gartner claims operating systems take around 12 to 18 months to mature, so with Vista timetabled for release in January 2007, the analyst group is expecting mainstream adoption to start in the middle of 2008.

However Jump warned Vista could slip even further back than the January 2007 shipping date - to March or even later - as Microsoft is already committed to missing the vital Christmas sweet-spot when many consumers choose to buy new PCs. The exact release date is largely irrelevant to most medium and large organisations which will probably wait at least a year before adopting the OS.

When and how companies choose to migrate to Vista also depends on what operating systems they are currently using, Jump said: "Migration depends on where are you in terms of existing OS. If you're on Windows 2000 then you have got three to four years to migrate, and so should start testing now.

"But if you're on XP, then you can take it much more leisurely; you can wait till Vista ships and then migrate through hardware attrition or through a big bang upgrade or even wait for point release in mid-2008 which should have WinFS." Windows Future Storage (WinFS) is Microsoft's next-generation file system.

Jump also raised the issue of hardware compatibility, and claimed that only machines bought in 2007 will probably be around long enough or have enough of their "useful life" left to run Vista, based on a three-year life cycle.

She said: "The specs show that you need at least 512MB of RAM and a modern processor, so most machines sold now will be able to run Vista. The bigger question is whether those machines will actually ever see Vista, if you're looking at mid-2008 to adopt it."

Companies should consider the migration process as beginning not when machines are physically placed on users' desks but when the inventory process of users' existing machines begins to discover what applications they are using and how personal settings can be moved onto the new machines. Jump added: "Migration is a very painful but important process."

Desktop Linux is still only used by a small minority of companies, and businesses should make sure they evaluate it thoroughly in terms of the cost associated with a migration, said Jump. "Despite the hype around Linux it remains niche and we see no real increase in volume over the next 12 months," she said.

Andrew Donoghue writes for ZDNet UK