Vista rollouts planned for 2008-09 financial year

Both Gartner and Forrester Research released reports last year predicting that enterprise uptake of Windows Vista would be sluggish, just as it was with Windows XP. Forrester, for instance, said in December that its surveys indicated that only a third of big business users planned to start deploying Vista when it became available -- or even by the time Microsoft releases a Service Pack 1 update, which typically takes a year or so. About 20 percent of users in Forrester's July 2005 survey of 56 large companies said they had no plans to upgrade to Vista at all.

For most companies, this delivery slip will not be an issue, because "it will take them 18 months of testing and planning before they can start deploying Windows Vista anyway", said Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner. "

Companies should have been planning for 2008 deployment anyway. Marc West, CIO at H&R Block, said the company had no plans to upgrade to Vista until 2009, at the earliest. The company has 120,000 PCs throughout its thousands of tax preparation branch offices running either Windows 2000 or X P. "Given the current state of XP, it is wise to go for a higher quality and more security-tested product versus rushing for a deadline and having problems that diminish the opportunity to gain market attention [and] happy customers," West said.

(With Eric Lai)