By IB Times Staff Reporter: Subscribe to IB's RSS feed
August 26, 2010 11:01 AM EDT
Companies will come under additional budgetary and resource pressure in the next two years as they migrate their PC operating systems from Windows XP and Windows 2000 to the newly deployed Windows 7, according to research firm Gartner.
The migration process will also entail the creation of thousands of jobs, Gartner said in a report on Thursday, adding the new demand spurt will also create a shortfall of qualified IT hands.
"Corporate IT departments typically prefer to migrate PC operating systems (OSs) via hardware attrition, which means bringing in the new
OS as they replace hardware through a normal refresh cycle," says the report.
"Microsoft will support Windows XP for four more years. With most migrations not starting until the fourth quarter of 2010 at the earliest, and PC hardware replacement cycles typically running at four to five years, most organizations will not be able to migrate to Windows 7 through usual planned hardware refresh before support for Windows XP ends."
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The need for quickly completing the migration process presents firms with three options, according to the report: Firms have to accelerate PC replacement plans, upgrade installed PCs or evaluate partial migration.
Buying new PCs with the OS upgrade ensures that machines have a full set of compatible drivers and a basic input/output system, the Gartner report points out. This course of action also reduces the number of times the machine is touched during its life and ensures that it will have a reasonably long operational life with the new OS over which to amortize the costs of the migration.
On the other hand, Using existing PCs will reduce the capital costs of migration, but will not reduce the labor costs of migration, says the report.
However, while the capital costs are reduced in this case, upgrading an installed PC simply postpones the inevitable replacement for two to three years. Users will need to be migrated twice, rather than once, during a four-year period.
For task workers, such as data-entry roles (these account for about 15 percent of the population in a typical organization), migrating from a PC to a hosted virtual desktop (HVD) environment is an alternative to PC migration. It would potentially speed up deployment, because it is one image deployed centrally.
"Whether replacing or upgrading PCs, it is clear that Windows 7 migration will have a noticeable impact on organizations' IT budgets," said Steve Kleynhans, research vice-president at Gartner. "Based on an accelerated upgrade, we expect that the proportion of the budget spent on PCs will need to increase between 20 percent as a best-case scenario and 60 percent at worst in 2011 and 2012. Assuming that PCs account for 15 percent of a typical IT budget, this means that this percentage will increase to 18 percent (best case) and 24 percent (worst case) which could have a profound effect on IT spending and on funding for associated projects during both those years."
The Gartner report also says the cost of IT labor will increase during 2011 and 2012 as demand for Windows 7 migration services spikes.
"We estimate that large and midsize organizations worldwide will migrate approximately 250 million PCs to Windows 7, during the migration timeline, so it makes sense for organizations that plan to leverage external services to line up service providers early," the report says.
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