With the disappointing take-up of Windows 95, Microsoft is settinggreat store by its new 32-bit operating system Windows NT. But is this anopportunity for other platforms to muscle in on the PC corporate market?
If the latest market research is to be believed, the next 12 months are likely to see a major shift in the information technology landscape.
The English ICA’s latest survey of IT usage among commercial accountants, carried out by Tate Bramald (see Technology File, 16 January), predicted a substantial rise in the number of companies planning to use Microsoft’s Windows New Technology (NT) to drive their financial systems.
NT is Microsoft’s latest Windows offering. It is a 32-bit, client/server environment that is designed to supersede Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.
It also threatens to supplant older minicomputer and Unix installations.
Currently, only 3% of the finance departments surveyed use Windows NT, but 20% said that their organisation plans to use it as the future operating system. When asked about networking intentions, 30% of the respondents indicated that they intended to switch to NT in the future.
The ICT/Tate Bramald findings show a similar pattern to an international survey of 500 European organisations carried out by International Data Corporation (IDC) for computer manufacturer AST. IDC found that 30% of companies would be running office automation tasks under Windows NT within 12 months. The take-up for Windows NT would equate to a six-fold increase in the installed base of NT systems, in contrast to a 200% growth rate projected for Windows 95.
The survey respondents cited better security, reliability, and a true multitasking, 32-bit architecture as the main advantages of Windows NT.
In the UK, however, most accountants still run Windows 3.1 and many even use MS-DOS-based applications. David Goldman, chairman of PC accounting software specialist Sage, highlighted Windows upgrades for users of MS-DOS-based products as a particularly lucrative market for the year ahead.
‘In spite of all the promotion, Windows 95 has not had the take-up people expected,’ said IT analyst Dennis Keeling, who is chairman of the Business & Accountancy Software Developers Association (BASDA). At a joint workshop run last year between BASDA and Microsoft, the Windows manufacturer encouraged software developers to concentrate on writing programs for the Windows NT environment.
‘Microsoft is turning to corporate customers and encouraging them to get NT Workstation for the desktop instead,’ said Keeling. ‘NT is not backwards-compatible, so there could be problems if end users won’t buy NT Workstation. But one of the big complaints about Windows has been that it is not properly reliable in a business environment.
NT Workstation has much more resilience.’
Keeling suggested that the biggest victim of the latest battles is likely to be Unix, the 32-bit operating system that led the trend away from proprietary mainframe systems to client/server applications. But the Unix world will continue to influence underlying technical developments, particularly via the Internet and Java, an Internet-based ‘platform-independent’ programming language developed by Sun Microsystems.
Java is built around the concept of a ‘virtual computer’. Java-enabling programs built into the latest generation of World Wide Web browsers allow machines controlled by different operating systems to run the same software, with no need for translation or conversion.
Already, users can download a trial version of Corel’s Office for Java, a suite of office productivity tools, from the World Wide Web located at http://www.corel.com.
Oracle, the leading developer of relational database management systems, built up its considerable business in the Unix client/server theatre.
The company’s chief executive, Larry Ellison, grabbed a lot of headlines in 1996 by promising the advent of the $500 Network Computer (NC).
The NC attacks the high overheads associated with supporting and maintaining PCs on corporate networks. NCs, if and when they start to appear, will be low-cost, no-frills systems designed to run ‘thin client’ software such as Internet browsers and Java-based applications. It’s a very attractive proposition, but Oracle has found few UK users willing to trust their accounting functions to its new Web-enabled offerings.
Paul Williams, the Arthur Andersen partner who chairs the institute’s IT faculty, sees little evidence of accountants choosing World Wide Web and Java-based technologies for business-critical financial applications.
‘Anyone getting into the new technology has got be aware that it is a relatively risky option,’ he said.
Malcolm Stirling, director of KPMG Management Consultants, suggested that year 2000 and EMU maintenance nightmares could even trigger a revival in older mainframe systems. ‘People can create very complicated environments within client/server architectures but there are not that many people who can help when it comes to testing year 2000 compliance with distributed applications and networked PC software, and those resources will become scarcer,’ said Stirling.
‘Mainframes have a certain simplicity and users can get a lot of support from IBM, or from offshore support resources, for example, in India. There could be a swing back to simple mainframe solutions.’
Neither technological nostalgia, nor an Internet stampede are likely to shift the prevailing atmosphere of uncertainty within the next 12 months.
So, as far as accounting systems are concerned, 1997 looks like it will be a good year for Microsoft.