As the anniversary of Windows Vista’s release to volume customers approaches, enterprise adoption of Microsoft’s latest operating system is still sparse. But many more firms now have plans to migrate in the near future, according to Forrester Research, which expects nearly a third of businesses will have begun deployment by the end of 2008, and that Vista will be on a quarter of enterprise PCs by the middle of the year.

Vista’s availability a year ago was followed in January by its retail launch and debut on new PC systems. Since then, sales have mainly been to the consumer market, with none of the European companies in Forrester’s survey reporting that they have yet deployed Vista.

Among the issues holding back migration are application compatibility difficulties with Vista, and the greater hardware requirements of the new platform. Many companies have been delaying until the Service Pack 1 (SP1) update to Windows Vista becomes available, and also until they have new desktop systems more capable of handling the OS.

While Forrester’s report predicts that Vista will power a quarter of enterprise PCs by mid-2008, other experts are more cautious.

“Our clients expect they may have perhaps 20 per cent of their installed base on Vista by the end of 2008, but they generally never hit what they predict,” said Mike Silver, research vice president for client computing at Gartner. Businesses in general are already about nine to 12 months behind where they expected they would be with Vista at this time last year, he added.

The release of SP1, due in the first quarter of 2008, is likely to lead to an increase in Vista migration activity, especially as it is expected to fix issues some customers have regarding compatibility and performance with the release code.

Microsoft made available a release candidate (RC) preview version of SP1 to about 15,000 private beta testers in mid-November, and still plans to make an RC of SP1 more widely available in the near future.

A Microsoft spokesperson repeated the company’s position that customers do not need to wait for SP1 to deploy Windows Vista, and encouraged them to begin their evaluation and deployment now. However, Silver said that many organisations regard the first service pack as a milestone in the shake-down of any new operating system.

“The first service pack is always a catalyst, but I don’t think it is as important as it once was,” Silver said, pointing out that Microsoft has made better use of Windows Update to fix issues with Vista than it did in the past.

“Vista is arguably getting better each month because of the patches,” Silver added.
Vista’s steeper hardware requirements remain an issue, and so many firms will deploy it as part of their hardware refresh cycle, according to Silver.

Dell, which offers Vista migration consultancy services in the UK, said that some customers are deploying new Vista-ready systems with Windows XP on them, in readiness for a future switchover. Silver, however, said that this approach would likely lead to even more labour and expense than simply deploying Vista as they upgrade.