Windows 7: What Asia's Companies Should Know

by Cesar Bacani, 06 November 2009

topics:
Enterprise Software and Systems Technology

tags:
HP Microsoft operating system software upgrade Symantec Windows 7 Windows Vista Windows XP

It’s too early to say whether Asia’s companies are adopting Windows 7 en masse, but Microsoft’s latest operating system is certainly eliciting a lot of business chatter in the region, as in the rest of the world. For CFOs, the question is whether to sanction a migration to the new system – and deal with the attendant cost, time and effort.

Several factors may lead to significant business adoption of Windows 7 in Asia. First is the fact that Windows XP, the default operating system of most personal computers in the workplace, is past its prime – it was released way back 2001. Windows Vista was supposed to replace Windows XP in 2007, but the take-up among corporate users had been disappointing.

“Many enterprises opted to stay with Windows XP as their standard OS,” HP Enterprise Services, a unit of computer maker HP, noted in a recent article. “The initial reasons centred on the additional hardware requirements at the time; later, enterprises were concerned about poor performance and application compatibility.”

Microsoft is touting Windows 7 as superior to Windows Vista and many analysts agree. “Performance and usability improvements make Windows 7 compelling to users,” specialists at Gartner, a technology research group, have concluded in a widely read research paper. “The new OS introduces a wide variety of optimisation, subtle changes and tweaks [of Windows Vista], along with some significant new functionality.”

Hard to Skip

Gartner also warns that Windows 7 is not ‘skippable’ – particularly for organisations that did not upgrade to Windows Vista, which describe the majority of the world’s enterprises. Microsoft will end support for Windows XP in less than five years, on April 8, 2014. Security patches and other upgrades will no longer be available, raising business continuity and risk management issues.

Independent software vendors (ISVs) are expected to stop developing new Windows XP applications and upgrading existing software earlier in anticipation of a drop in demand. Those applications will not run on Windows 7 (or on Windows Vista, for that matter), so the time companies have to migrate to Windows 7 may be shorter than five years. “We anticipate waning third-party support for XP beginning in late 2011 and accelerating through 2012,” says Gartner.

Gartner estimates that most organisations would need at least 12 to 18 months to prepare for the migration to Windows 7, including labour-intensive compatibility testing. Citing its experience migrating client environments, HP also puts the typical timeframe at 12 to 18 months, given that the typical enterprise has between 1,000 to 1,600 applications that need to be migrated as well.

“If the average PC life cycle is four years, you need to begin planning for Windows 7 no later than March 2010 to complete the migration before the end of support for Windows XP,” says Julie Watkins, workplace services product marketing manager for HP Enterprise Services.

Be aware of the costs, though. In the United States, Gartner estimates that migration costs could be $1,035 to $1,930 per user to move from Windows XP to Windows 7. Companies in Asia may be tempted to use pirated Windows 7 software, which can be bought relatively easily across the region. Needless to say, that is never a good way to do business for all kinds of reasons, including legal prosecution and security risks.

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