Hong Kong Computer Society - enterpriseinnovation.net

year alone can justify its Windows 7 deployment.
Early Windows 7 deployment customers
are already projecting cost savings.
Direct cost savings of IT labor dedicated
to desktop management are expected to
range between $89 and $160 per PC annually.
Ballmer unveils Win7
At the Windows 7 launch in the US,
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled
the general availability of Windows 7
with his usual enthusiasm, emphasizing
ease of use, faster boot up times and the
ability to bring together the PC and the
television.
Windows 7 is a long
overdue upgrade from
Windows XP
– Manny Fernandez,
Li & Fung
Ballmer drum-beating aside, Windows
7 has garnered some of the best reviews
of any version of the OS.
Enterprises, on the other hand, are a
more complicated bunch.
Yet despite the testing, planning and
time-consuming complexities of an enterprise
OS upgrade, corporate customers
at the Windows 7 launch interviewed for
this story are hankering to deploy Windows
7 in their environments.
Early adopters from different lines of
business and at different stages of migration
agree on three points: Windows XP
has had its day; Vista was never worth
it; and Windows 7 offers businesses too
many security, networking and navigation
features to ignore.
XP couldn’t last forever
Holland America Line, a US-based
Windows 7: positively glowing
cruise ship company with a fleet that
travels all over the world, has been aggressively
testing Windows 7 as part of a
migration from Windows XP for its 3,900
PCs across 14 cruise ships.
Application managers in the company’s
IT and finance departments have been
testing Windows 7 for application compatibility
for about a year. Though only
20 machines run Windows 7 right now,
IT manager Phil Norman says that a year
from now he plans to have 50 percent of
all machines at Holland America Line
running Windows 7.
“We tested Vista with a small group,
but there were too many application compatibility
issues. The benefit just wasn’t
there,” says Norman, adding that Windows
7 is a “much more usable operating
system, with better security features.”
Norman gives kudos to Windows XP
for being a very stable and easy OS to
maintain. “But only to a certain extent,”
he says. “More and more we’re relying on
third party vendors with XP, and it can’t
handle newer drivers.”
Del Monte Foods, the US-based food
production and distribution company
that sells canned fruits and vegetables as
well as pet foods, is at a similar stage in
their Windows 7 deployment as Holland
America Line, with 45 out of its 3,000 total
business users running Windows 7 on
their machines.
The other users run Windows XP. Del
Monte plans to have Windows 7 on 1,000
machines within a year. The company
skipped Vista because it was “cumbersome,
hard to use and had too many compatibility
issues,” says David Glenn, Del
Monte’s director of enterprise operations.
According to Ovum’s Principal Analyst,
Jens Butler, of greatest concern is
the impact that running Windows 7 will
have on existing customer business applications,
and especially ERP offerings,
often developed for the XP platform.
While Ovum expects some teething
problems for those with a large portfolio
of in-house developed applications, much
functionality will be retained.
“The XP mode, still somewhat an
unknown quantity in enterprise environments,
has the potential to facilitate
XP-only applications. Rigorous testing
procedures (be they internal or externally
provisioned) will need to be carried out to
ensure that critical application downtime
and impact is minimized and the line of
business offerings fully supported,” said
Butler. 3
—IDG reporters contributed to this
report
www.cw.com.hk
Nov 2009 Computerworld Hong Kong 43