The length and severity of Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 unplanned outages and the patching actions related to each correspond to specific line item capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX) costs for the business. Reliability, measured by downtime, can positively or negatively impact TCO and accelerate or delay the time it takes to realize ROI.
Improvements or declines in reliability also mitigate or increase technical and business risks to the organization’s end users and its external customers. The ability to meet service-level agreements (SLAs) hinges on server reliability, uptime and manageability. These are key indicators that enable organizations to determine which server operating system platform or combination thereof is most suitable.
Overall, these survey responses provide crucial, comparative reliability metrics to enable customers to make informed choices on which server hardware and server operating system or combination thereof, best suits their specific business and budgets needs.
Conclusions and Recommendations
In summary the ITIC 2010-2011 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability Survey findings indicates that all of the server operating system platforms have achieved a high degree of reliability. However, the IBM AIX 7.1 operating system, followed closely by Windows Server 2008 R2, HP UX 11i v3 and Novell SuSE Enterprise Linux 11 are the top four most reliable server OS distributions.

No Rush to the Cloud — Yet

Users on the Move: Number of Mobile workers increases
The survey results also confirm what has been widely reported: that greater numbers and percentages of users are spending more time telecommuting, traveling and generally working outside the corporate offices.
Over half – 58 percent of businesses say that up to 25 percent of their employees work remotely; another 18 percent of respondents said that between 26 to 50 percent of their workers are remote; 11 percent said that 51 to 75 percent work outside the office and seven percent of respondents said that 76 to 100 percent of their employees work remotely. It is significant that only 7 percent of the over 400 businesses polled say that none of their workers are remote or mobile.
Apparently, IT departments are getting used to support mobile workers: just over half 52 percent of survey respondents indicated they find it just as easy to support remote employees as their local workers; however 43 percent say they find it more difficult, while the remaining seven percent are unsure.

To date only a 17 percent minority – less than two out of 10 businesses who responded to the Sunbelt/ITIC poll say their organizations have migrated any IT functions to the cloud. By contrast, 62 percent of those surveyed say their firm have not migrated any IT functions to a cloud environment; another 19 percent of companies are studying the issue but have not yet decided and the remaining two percent are “Unsure” of their firm’s cloud deployment plans.
“No compelling business reason,” was the most oft-cited reason for holding off on a cloud deployment and that was chosen by 66 percent of the respondents. Another 49 percent of survey participants indicated their organizations’ concerns about security and the need for specific guarantees to safeguard their for sensitive data is deterring cloud deployments.
Only a small five percent minority felt that a cloud deployment would be disruptive to their current network environment.
Anti-Virus software is current
The survey respondents were certain that their anti-virus software is doing the job. In a clear indication that organizations recognize the need to keep their AV packages updated, nearly eight-out-of-10 businesses – 79 percent affirmed that their AV software is current, while 17 percent indicate that the majority of their AV packages are up-to-date. Overall, less than five percent of those polled say their AV software is outdated.
Similarly, an overwhelming 77 percent of respondents reported that they’re satisfied with the ability of their firms current security packages to alert them to the presence of viruses, worms, Trojans and other malware threats. Only 16 percent of respondents expressed concern regarding the ability of their AV software to alert them to potential security breaches, while the remaining seven percent were unsure.
Desktop Management
When it comes to desktop management, 41 percent of companies use three or four different software packages to oversee crucial functions such as Remote PC monitoring; Patch and update management/deployment; malware protection; asset inventory; critical alerting; remote assistance/remote control; IT asset management reporting. Another 16 percent deploy a singular management package while 20 percent say their firms use two management packages and 12 percent were “unsure.” The remaining 12 percent indicated they do not use any management software to manage their desktops.
The chief challenges and deterrents to installing and deploying desktop management packages are: integration and interoperability which was cited by 57 percent of survey respondents and the large upfront investment costs which 47 percent say make upper management unlikely to approve the project. Nearly one-third of survey respondents cited the difficulty of quantifying TCO and ROI and the need for too much training and orientation as the biggest challenge to deploying desktop management solutions, while 28 percent say they have difficulty comparing the functionality of the various products.
Among the other Survey Highlights:
• Over half the survey respondents – 56 percent – use a dedicated management tool to deploy their software updates, but a surprising 42 percent still manually install their software updates.
• Nearly seven out of 10 businesses – 68 percent – say they’re satisfied with their organization’s current ability to ensure that the corporate PCs have the latest security updates & patches compared with 26 percent who replied negatively to that question.
• Just over half – 55 percent – of those polled indicated they were satisfied with their firm’s ability to inventory the hardware assets (total number, make, model and specifications) in your environment; while 34 percent said “No” and 11 percent were “Unsure.” The ability to inventory hardware assets is one of the crucial components necessary to enable companies to ascertain TCO and ROI.

Windows 7 is a winner!

As we noted in our previous blog, Windows 7 officially celebrates its 1st birthday, today — October 22nd. And there are plenty of reasons to celebrate. Yes, Windows 7 has sold over 240 million copies, to date making it the fastest selling OS in Microsoft’s (or any vendor’s) history. And yes, many of those sales can be attributed to pent-up demand because the overwhelming majority of the Windows installed base elected to remain on Windows XP and skip Vista. Admittedly, many organizations would opt to remain on Windows XP indefinitely if Microsoft was not ending support for the nearly 10 year old desktop OS. Those disclaimers aside, Windows 7′s success is no fluke.

A three-quarters majority – 73 percent of the 400+ respondents to the latest joint Sunbelt Software/ITIC poll, gave Windows 7 an “excellent,” “very good” or “good” rating.
That’s very close to the 80 percent majority of beta and early adopters who gave the Windows 7 the same high marks in the 2009 survey. The latest responses, coming after corporations have used Windows 7 in production for a full year, provides the best evidence that the Microsoft operating system is living up to the hype and fulfilling business’ needs. Only a small three percent minority of survey respondents gave Windows 7 a “Poor” and/or “Unsatisfactory” rating.
And a 72 percent majority of survey participants say they have already deployed, are in the process of deploying or will shortly deploy Windows 7. Only 7 percent of those polled indicated that they are “unlikely” to deploy Windows 7 at all and none of the respondents said they plan on switching to a rival operation system.
Lack of funds was the chief reason cited by the remaining 21 percent of respondents who said they have no definitive plans to upgrade to Windows 7 over the next 12 months. Anecdotal user comments confirmed that many companies are still in the grip of a recession and will wait until they upgrade their desktop hardware to migrate to Windows 7.
Windows XP is still the most widely deployed desktop OS – with 90 percent of the respondents indicating it was present in their shops. But Windows 7 is catching up quickly: 83 percent of those polled say they’ve deployed Windows 7 compared to only 37 percent who have Windows Vista.
Interestingly, the Apple Mac is the most popular non-Windows operating system as mainstream enterprises continue to adopt it. According to our poll, Apple Macs are present in 28 percent of your networks – which is three times more than the two most popular Linux and open source operating system distributions. Nine percent of survey respondents indicated they use Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu – the latter of which has made steady gains in the last two years.
Among large enterprises, IBM’s AIX was clearly the most popular UNIX distribution, besting both HP UX and Sun Solaris (now owned by Oracle) by a 2 to 1 margin.
Nearly two-thirds or 60% of you indicated you will deploy Windows 7; 30% of you say you’ll migrate to the new Microsoft desktop operating system within the first six months while another 30% say intend to make the transition sometime within the year. Four out of 10 businesses – 40% — have no definitive migration timetable.

The results of the new, independent ITIC 2009 Global Server Virtualization Survey, which polled more than 700 corporations worldwide during May/June and August, reveal that server virtualization deployments have remained strong throughout the ongoing 2009 economic downturn. It also shows that the three market leaders Citrix, Microsoft and VMware, are consolidating their positions even as the virtualization arena itself consolidates through mergers, acquisitions and partnerships.

Microsoft in particular has made big year-over-year gains in deployments and market share. Thanks to the summer release of the new Hyper-V 2.0 with live migration capabilities  the Redmond, Washington software firm has substantially closed the feature/performance gap between itself and VMware’s ESX Server.  The technical advances of Hyper-V combined with the excellent conditions of Microsoft’s licensing program, make the company’s virtualization products very competitive and alluring. Three out of five — 59% of the survey respondents — indicated their intent to deploy Hyper-V 2.0 within the next 12 to 18 months.

Survey responses also show a groundswell of support for application and desktop virtualization deployments. These two market segments constitute a much smaller niche of deployments and installations compared to virtualized server environments. The survey results show that application virtualization (where Microsoft is the market leader) and desktop virtualization (in which Citrix is the market leader), are both poised for significant growth in the 2010 timeframe.

Another key survey revelation was that 40% of respondents, especially businesses with 500 or more end users, said they either have or plan to install virtualization products from multiple vendors. This will place more emphasis and importance on integration, interoperability, management and third-party add-on tools to support these more complex, heterogeneous virtualization environments.

Among the other key survey highlights:

• The “Big Three,” Citrix, Microsoft and VMware, are bolstering their positions with a slew of new offerings and a plethora of partnerships due out in the 2009 summer and fall.
• Partnerships and Alliances: The alliance between Citrix and Microsoft remains robust as these two firms believe that there’s strength in numbers, as they mount a challenge to server virtualization leader VMware’s continuing dominance.
• Microsoft Hyper-V Closes the Gap: Microsoft made big year-over-year market share gains from 2008 to 2009. The survey data shows current Hyper-V usage at 32%; but 59% plan to adopt in next 12 to 18 months.
• VMware remains the market leader in server virtualization with approximately 50% share among enterprise users; Microsoft follows with 26% share.
• Microsoft is the current market leader in application virtualization with a 15% share; followed by Citrix with 11% and VMware with 7%. However, nearly two-thirds of businesses have not yet deployed application virtualization.
• Citrix is the market leader in desktop virtualization with a 19% market share followed by Microsoft with 15% and VMware with 8%. But again, over 60% of corporations have not yet begun to virtualize their desktop environments.
• Mergers and Acquisitions Raise Questions: There is confusion among the legacy Sun and Virtual Iron users as to what will happen to both the product lines and technical support in the wake of both firms’ acquisition by Oracle.
• Apple Mac is a popular virtualization platform; nearly 30% of respondents said they use Mac hardware in conjunction with Windows operating systems to virtualize their server and desktop environments.
• Parallels and VMware Fusion are the two leading Mac virtualization vendors with a near 50/50 split market share.
• Time to Bargain: Despite budget cuts and reduced resources only a very small percentage of companies — 7% — have attempted to renegotiate their virtualization licensing contracts to get lower prices and better deals.
• Server Virtualization Lowers TCO: Almost 50% of survey respondents reported that server virtualization lets them lower their total cost of ownership (TCO) and achieve faster return on investment (ROI); however, only 25% of businesses could quantify the actual monetary cost savings
• Users Prefer Terra Firma Virtualization to Cloud: Users are moving slowly with respect to public cloud computing migrations, which are heavily dependent on virtualization technology. To date, only 14% of survey respondents said they will move their data to a virtualized public cloud within the next six-to-12 months.

This survey identifies the trends that propel or impede server, application and desktop virtualization deployments and to elucidate the timeframes in which corporations plan to virtualize their environments. ITIC advises all businesses, irrespective of size or vertical market to conduct due diligence to determine which virtualization solution or combination of products best meets their technical and business needs in advance of any migration. And in light of the ongoing economic downturn, businesses are well advised to negotiate hard with their vendors for the best deals and to ensure that the appropriate IT managers receive the necessary training and certification to ensure a smooth, trouble-free virtualization upgrade. This will enable the business to lower TCO, accelerate ROI and minimize and mitigate risk to an acceptable level.

Those are the results of the ITIC 2009 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Reliability Survey which polled C-level executives and IT managers at 400 corporations from 20 countries worldwide. The results indicate that the IBM AIX operating system whether running on Big Blue’s Power servers (System p5s)  is the clear winner, offering rock solid reliability. The IBM servers running AIX consistently score at least 99.99% or just 15 minutes of unplanned per server, per annum downtime.

Overall, the results showed improvements in reliability, patch management procedures and an across-the-board reduction in per server, per annum Tier 1, Tier 2 and the most severe Tier 3 outages.  Among the other survey highlights:

• IBM leads all vendors for both server hardware and server OS reliability as well as the fewest number of Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 unplanned server outages per year. IBM AIX running on the System p5s had less than one unplanned outage incident per server in a 12 month period. More impressively, the IBM servers experience no Tier 3 outages. Tier 3 outages are the most severe and usually involve more than four hours or a half-day worth of downtime and can also result in lost data.
• HP UX also performed well though HP servers notch approximately 25 minutes more downtime than IBM servers, depending on model and configuration – or just under 40 minutes per server, per annum downtime.
• IT managers spend approximately 11minutes to apply patches to IBM servers running the AIX operating system, which is again, the least amount of time spent patching any server or operating system. The open source Ubuntu distribution is a close second with IT managers spending 12 minutes to apply patches, while IT managers in the Apple Mac OS X 10.x. Novell SuSE and customized Linux distribution environments each spend 15 to 19 minutes applying patches.
• IBM also took top honors in another important category: IBM Power servers and AIX experience the lowest amount of the more severe Tier 2 and Tier 3 outages combined of any server hardware or server operating system. The combined total of Tier 2 and Tier 3 outages accounted for just 19% of all per server, per annum failures.
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 showed the biggest improvements of any of the vendors. The Windows Server 2003 and 2008 operating systems running on Intel-based platforms saw a 35% reduction in the amount of unplanned per server, per annum downtime from 3.77 hours in 2008 to 2.42 hours in 2009. The number of annual Windows Server Tier 3 outages also decreased by 31% year over year and the time spent applying patches similarly decline by 35% from last year to 32 minutes in 2009.
• This year’s survey for the first time, also incorporated reliability results for the Apple Mac and OS X 10.x OS platform.  The survey respondents indicated that Apple products are extremely competitive in an enterprise setting. IT managers spend approximately 15 minutes per server to apply patches and Apple Macs recorded just under 40 minutes of per server, per annum downtime.

ITIC partnered with Stratus Technologies in Maynard, Ma. a vendor that specializes in high availability and fault tolerant hardware and software solutions, to compose the Web-based survey. ITIC conducted this blind, non-vendor and non-product specific survey which polled businesses on their application availability requirements, virtualization and the compliance rate of their service level agreements (SLAs). None of the respondents received any remuneration. The Web-based survey consisted of multiple choice and essay questions. ITIC analysts also conducted two dozen first person customer interviews to obtain detailed anecdotal data.

Respondents ranged from SMBs with 100 users to very large enterprises with over 100,000 end users. Industries represented: academic, advertising, aerospace, banking, communications, consumer products, defense, energy, finance, government, healthcare, insurance, IT services, legal, manufacturing, media and entertainment, telecommunications, transportation, and utilities. None of the survey respondents received any remuneration for their participation. The respondents hailed from 15 countries; 85% were based in North America.

Survey Highlights

The survey results uncovered many “disconnects” between the levels of application reliability that corporate enterprises profess to need and the availability rates their systems and applications actually deliver. Additionally, a significant portion of the survey respondents had difficulty defining what constitutes high application availability; do not specifically track downtime and could not quantify or qualify the cost of downtime and its impact on their network operations and business.

Among the other survey highlights:

• A 54% majority of IT managers and executives surveyed said more than two-thirds of their companies’ applications require the highest level of availability – 99.99% — or four nines of uptime.
• Over half – 52% of survey respondents said that virtualization technology increases application uptime and availability; only 4% said availability decreased as a result of virtualization deployments.
• In response to the question, “which aspect of application availability is most important” to the business, 59% of those polled cited the prevention of unplanned downtime as being most crucial; 40% said disaster recovery and business continuity were most important; 38% said that minimizing planned downtime to apply patches and upgrades was their top priority; 16% said the ability to meet SLAs was most important and 40% of the survey respondents said all of the choices were equally crucial to their business needs.
• Some 41% said they would be satisfied with conventional 99% to 99.9% (the equivalent of two or three nines) availability for their most critical applications. Ninety-nine percent or 99.9% does not qualify as a high-availability or continuous-availability solution.
• An overwhelming 81% of survey respondents said the number of applications that demand high availability has increased in the past two-to-three years.
• Of those who said they have been unable to meet service level agreements (SLAs), 72% can’t or don’t keep track of the cost and productivity losses created by downtime.
• Budgetary constraints are a gating factor prohibiting many organizations from installing software solutions that would improve application availability. Overall, 70% of the survey respondents said they lacked the funds to purchase value-added availability solutions (40%); or were unsure how much or if their companies would spend to guarantee application availability (30%).
• Of the 30% of businesses that quantified how much their firms would spend on availability solutions, 3% indicated they would spend $2,000 to $4,000; 8% said $4,000 to $5,000; another 3% said $5,000 to $10,000; 11% — mainly large enterprises indicated they were willing to allocate $10,000 to $15,000 to ensure application availability and 5% said they would spend “whatever it takes.”

According to the survey findings, just under half of all businesses – 49% – lack the budget for high availability technology and 40% of the respondents reported they don’t understand what qualifies as high availability. An overwhelming eight out of 10 IT managers – 80% — are unable to quantify the cost of downtime to their C-level executives.

To reiterate, the ITIC survey polled users on the various aspects and impact of application availability and downtime but it did not specify any products or vendors.

The survey results supplemented by ITIC first person interviews with IT managers and C-level executives clearly shows that on a visceral level, businesses are very aware of the need for increased application availability has grown. This is particularly true in light of the emergence of new technologies like application and desktop virtualization, cloud computing, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The fast growing remote, mobile and telecommuting end user population utilizes unified communications and collaboration applications and utilities is also spurring the need for greater application availability and reliability.

High Application Availability Not a Reality for 80% of Businesses

The survey results clearly show that network uptime isn’t keeping pace with the need for application availability. At the same time, IT managers and C-level executives interviewed by ITIC did comprehend the business risks associated with downtime, even though most are unable to quantify the cost of downtime or qualify the impact to the corporation, its customers, suppliers and business partners when unplanned application and network outages occur.

“We are continually being asked to do more with less,” said an IT manager at a large enterprise in the Northeast. “We are now at a point, where the number of complex systems requiring expert knowledge has exceeded the headcount needed to maintain them … I am dreading vacation season,” he added.

Another executive at an Application Service provider acknowledged that even though his firm’s SLA guarantees to customers are a modest 98%, it has on occasion, been unable to meet those goals. The executive said his firm compensated one of its clients for a significant outage incident. “We had a half day outage a couple of years ago which cost us in excess of $40,000 in goodwill payouts to a handful of our clients, despite the fact that it was the first outage in five years,” he said.

Another user said a lack of funds prevented his firm from allocating capital expenditure monies to purchase solutions that would guarantee 99.99% application availability. “Our biggest concern is keeping what we have running and available. Change usually costs money, and at the moment our budgets are simply in survival mode,” he said.

Another VP of IT at a New Jersey-based business said that ignorance is not bliss. “If people knew the actual dollar value their applications and customers represent, they’d already have the necessary software availability solutions in place to safeguard applications,” he said. “Yes, it does cost money to purchase application availability solutions, but we’d rather pay now, then wait for something to fail and pay more later,” the VP of IT said.

Overall, the survey results show that the inability of users to put valid metrics and cost formulas in place to track and quantify what uptime means to their organization is woefully inadequate and many corporations are courting disaster.

ITIC advises businesses to track downtime, the actual cost of downtime to the organization and to take the necessary steps to qualify the impact of downtime including lost data, potential liability risks e.g. lost business, lost customers, potential lawsuits and damage to the company’s reputation. Once a company can quantify the amount of downtime associated with its main line of business applications, the impact of downtime and the risk to the business, it can then make an accurate assessment of whether or not its current IT infrastructure adequately supports the degree of application availability the corporation needs to maintain its SLAs.

Apple Mac and OS X 10.x continue to make inroads in the enterprise.

ITIC’s 2009 Global IT and Technology Trends Survey shows that corporate enterprises continue to embrace the Apple Mac and OS X 10.x server operating system in numbers not seen since the late 1980s. ITIC polled IT managers and C-level executives at 700 corporations worldwide. Among the survey highlights:

• Over two-thirds of the 700 survey respondents – 68% — indicated they are likely to allow their end users to deploy Macs as their corporate enterprise desktops in the next 12 months.
• Almost one-quarter or 23% have a significant number of Macintoshes (> 50) present in their organizations. Apple Macs have long been a favorite of company executives, but the survey responses clearly indicate that Mac usage has filtered down to rank and file knowledge workers across the enterprise.
• Half of all the survey respondents – 50% — said they plan to increase integration with existing Apple consumer products such as the iPhone to allow users to access corporate Email and other applications. This augurs well for the iPhone to establish itself as a viable alternative to Research In Motion’s (RIM) as a mobile device that allows users to access Email and other collaboration applications.

In summary, the ITIC/Sunbelt survey responses show that businesses will find themselves challenged to do more with fewer resources. The respondents also exhibited their practicality and resourcefulness in extending the lifespan of still-useful technologies like Windows XP. However those who have the need and the budget, will get an able assist from emerging technologies like virtualization – and for those that correctly configure and deploy them – Vista and the Mac and OS X 10.x

The latest independent joint ITIC/Sunbelt Software survey found that demand and deployment for several technology sectors – most notably server and application virtualization – will remain robust in direct contrast to the bearish global economic climate.

ITIC and Sunbelt, polled C-level executives and network administrators at over 700 corporations worldwide on a variety of technology and business related topics. The Web-based survey included multiple choice and essay responses. In addition, ITIC and Sunbelt conducted two dozen first person customer interviews to validate the survey responses. ITIC and Sunbelt received no vendor sponsorship for this research. Additionally, no vendors had any influence or input into the survey or the results and none of the survey respondents received any remuneration for their participation. Approximately 85% of the respondents came from North America; the remaining 15% came from 20 countries including Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and South America.

Virtualization Results

Virtually Yours: Server Virtualization Still a Top Priority in the Datacenter

Virtualization remains a high growth technology area, and the survey found that the market leaders – VMware, Microsoft and Citrix are all consolidating their positions. The survey also showed that while desktop and application virtualization will play a pivotal role for businesses – particularly enterprises with > 500 end users, the market will not materialize as quickly as it did for server virtualization. Among the survey highlights:

• VMware remains the market leader but Microsoft’s Hyper-V is closing the gap. In response to a question in which we asked customers to select ALL the virtualization products they plan to use/deploy in 2009, nearly 60% said they plan to deploy VMware’s ESX Server (29%) or the free VMware Server (30%) . However, 52% of the respondents indicated they will use Microsoft’s Hyper-V or the older Microsoft Virtual Server; 37% of respondents indicated they will opt for Hyper-V compared with the remaining 15% who said they will use the older Virtual Server. This percentage is double the number of survey respondents who indicated they would use Microsoft hypervisor solutions when we polled users in a 2007 survey.
• When it comes to Application Virtualization solutions, Microsoft’s App-V is the market leader, clearly beating VMware’s ThinApp by a 2-to-1 margin, which also came trailed Citrix’s XenApp 5.0. That said, it must be noted that thus far, only about 15% of the survey respondents have fully virtualized their applications across the entire enterprise.
• It’s still very early in the game for the emerging application virtualization market: nearly two-thirds — 62% — of businesses have not yet even begun to deploy application virtualization in production environments (though pilot networks abound) or even chosen an application virtualization vendor.
• Interestingly, in spite of cost constraints and pressures on IT budgets, only 7% of the survey respondents said they had attempted to renegotiate the terms and conditions of their virtualization licensing contracts to get better deals. Another 27% said they were studying the issue but had not yet made any definitive attempts to renegotiate and 66% said “No.”

Microsoft Vista: Most Users “Surprisingly” Satisfied

On the Windows desktop OS front, the ITIC/Sunbelt survey respondents gave Microsoft’s much maligned Vista operating system surprisingly high satisfaction ratings. We say “surprising” because Vista has gotten a lot of bad ink, much of it undeserved. Overall, 59% of the survey respondents said Vista was “Excellent”, “very good” or “good.” Despite these grades though, 45% of those polled said they would skip Vista and go directly to Windows 7 when that desktop OS ships in early 2010. Drilling further into the Vista responses:

• To date, only 10% of the 700 survey respondents’ organizations have deployed Vista.
• Windows XP is the primary desktop OS for 88% of the respondents.
• Vista seems a victim of Windows XP’s success: Among the 45% of survey respondents who indicated they’ll skip Vista, the main reason(s) cited were cost constraints and the prevailing feeling that Windows XP is more than adequately meeting corporations’ business and technology needs.
• The Vista experience was much better than anticipated for the 10% of companies that use Vista is their primary desktop OS: 27% rated Vista’s performance, reliability and security Excellent or Very Good; another 32% rated it “Good”, 19% said it was “Satisfactory.” Only 19% gave it an “Unsatisfactory” rating, mainly due to application incompatibility problems.

One recurring theme among the survey respondents was that since Windows XP is getting the job done, there’s no compelling business reason to upgrade to Vista.

“Windows XP, Windows 2003 and our other applications are more than adequate for now,” said one network administrator. “That means we will be investing very little in new infrastructure for the next couple of years. The constant upgrade progression for the sake of “keeping current” is dead for now,” he added.

The Vista desktop OS – all six flavors – is generally solid. The biggest impediment facing large enterprises deploying Vista is application incompatibility. This problem is especially acute in large enterprises that have dozens of third party applications associated with specific vertical markets. Consider the case of one such enterprise based in the Northeast with over 3,000 end users.

The company’s IT manager said his firm was 65% deployed onto Vista Business but, he noted, two of his crucial application vendors “have not yet migrated their products.” One is a financial application and the other is a GIS application. “They [the ISVs] have promised compliance by the end of 2009 so we plan to be 100% deployed on Vista by Q1 2010. At that time we’ll be ready to continue our normal replacement cycle (30% per year) deploying Windows 7 Service Pack 1 in late 2010!”

Apple Macintosh Enterprise Usage Continues to Grow

And finally, Apple Mac and OS X 10.x continue to make inroads in the enterprise.

• Over two-thirds of the 700 survey respondents – 68% — indicated they are likely to allow their end users to deploy Macs as their corporate enterprise desktops in the next 12 months.
• Almost one-quarter or 23% have a significant number of Macintoshes (> 50) present in their organizations. Apple Macs have long been a favorite of company executives, but the survey responses clearly indicate that Mac usage has filtered down to rank and file knowledge workers across the enterprise.
• Half of all the survey respondents – 50% — said they plan to increase integration with existing Apple consumer products such as the iPhone to allow users to access corporate Email and other applications. This augurs well for the iPhone to establish itself as a viable alternative to Research In Motion’s (RIM) as a mobile device that allows users to access Email and other collaboration applications.

In summary, the ITIC/Sunbelt survey responses show that businesses will find themselves challenged to do more with fewer resources. The respondents also exhibited their practicality and resourcefulness in extending the lifespan of still-useful technologies like Windows XP. However those who have the need and the budget, will get an able assist from emerging technologies like virtualization – and for those that correctly configure and deploy them – Vista and the Mac and OS X 10.x