No Vista plans for more than half of European businesses

More than half of European organisations have no plan to upgrade to Microsoft's long-awaited operating system Windows Vista, which is due to be released at the end of November.

A Forrester survey of 302 IT chiefs at European businesses found that 20 per cent are also planning to wait up to two years after Vista's release before deploying it. Just six per cent said they planned to deploy it within the first six months of release and 18 per cent within one year.

The report said: "This is behind the anticipated rate of adoption in North America, reflecting greater resistance to the Microsoft product strategy from users in the European market."

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More than one-third (35 per cent) of Windows-based PCs in the organisations questioned also still run either Windows 2000 or an older version of the operating system, Forrester found.

The State of Enterprise Infrastructure 2006 study said that while the overall outlook for IT spending in 2006 remains "austere", enterprises are making significant new investments in hardware, with servers and PCs taking up around one-sixth of the entire IT budget.

More than half (55 per cent) of European organisations run HP servers, followed by 32 per cent with IBM servers, 26 per cent with Dell, eight per cent with Sun and seven per cent with Fujitsu-Siemens. The majority of organisations also only use one vendor and two-thirds said they are unlikely to change their supplier in the next two years.

But businesses are continuing to struggle with complexity in their server environments and 52 per cent of organisations are reducing the number and variety of their server configurations as a priority.

This is leading to more interest in server virtualisation, with more than a quarter of organisations either looking at it or already piloting it.

In terms of infrastructure projects, disaster recovery and security are the main priorities for the next 12 months, and are driving much of the increased hardware spending.