Switch to Vista? It's a headache, say IT chiefs

Time and complexity are putting UK IT managers off migrating their organisation onto Microsoft's Vista operating system.

New research has found nearly half of IT managers (49 per cent) will take more than 12 months to fully migrate their organisation onto Vista - once preparation, testing, rollout and post-migration issues have all been taken into account.

David Bradshaw analyst at Ovum told silicon.com: "It is a big project to go onto Vista. I'm not entirely surprised by [the research]. That's the kind of timescale I would expect."

Vista: all the coverage...

♦  Vista - when will business take the plunge?
♦  Gates: Vista selling faster than XP
♦  Tesco.com takes stock with Windows Vista
♦  CIO Jury: IT chiefs not yet planning for Windows Vista
♦  Blighty Vista "overcharging" attacked

A further 45 per cent say the whole process would take six months or more, with just six per cent saying the process would take less then three months.

Just three per cent of respondents said they are planning to migrate their corporate systems onto Vista immediately.

As well as time, the sheer complexity of migration was cited by 62 per cent of IT managers as putting them off a move to Vista.

The research also shows IT staff are concerned about post migration issues such as downtime - leading to loss of productivity - and user questions about personal settings or applications wasting support staff time.

Because of this, Bradshaw suggested, IT departments may wait for staff to start using Vista at home to reduce the number of user issues emerging following migration. However, some companies such as Tesco.com have already taken the plunge and migrated to Vista.

The research was carried out by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Enteo Software and covered 100 IT managers from companies of 1,000 employees or more.