Dell upbeat about Vista uptake

Dell's chief executive has predicted that most of his company's business customers will migrate to Vista by 2009.

Speaking to journalists at Gartner's ITxpo Symposium in Orlando, Florida, Michael Dell said: "We have a number [of business customers] who have gone to Vista, and almost all are planning to go to Vista: some in 2008, and some in 2009. As they take on new IT deployments with new hardware features, Vista will be much better supported."

However, Dell's assertions run contrary to research published earlier in October by market research company Context, which found Vista sales for business machines were slowing.

Context found Vista Business accounted for 13 per cent of PC sales among European IT distributors in August 2007 - down from 17 per cent the previous month. Meanwhile, XP Professional accounted for 27 per cent of PC sales but it also saw poor growth, with August's figures down by four per cent compared to the previous month.

Vista Business is the direct successor to XP Professional.

silicon.com's Gemma Simpson contributed to this article

Tom Espiner writes for ZDNet UK