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Ñ HONG KONG
IT spending will reach HK$38 billion in
2009 in Hong Kong, IDC estimated
Ñ GLOBAL
Survey: Windows 7 migration plan incomplete
A
large number of companies plan
to move to Windows 7, but many
of them have no solid plans for
when they will do it, according to a recent
Forrester survey.
The issue is one of preparation to accommodate
the new operating system,
which shipped recently to consumers but
has been available to volume licensing
customers since late August.
“There is a lot of work to get your applications
and hardware compatible with
the new operating system … especially for
organizations that support XP and did not
do a lot of application compatibility testing
when Vista was released,” said Benjamin
Gray, the Forrester analyst who conducted
the survey with 653 PC decision-makers at
North American and European enterprises
and small-to-midsize businesses.
The survey shows that 66 percent of companies
plan to move to Win 7, but of those
companies, a whopping 49 percent say they
have no specific migration plans yet.
“I suspect most of those organizations are
in the relatively early stages of application
compatibility testing and remediation and
they are determining if it will be 12, 16 or 18
months to get there. But as soon as they are
ready they are going to move to Windows
7,” Gray said.
Steve Kleynhans, an analyst with Gartner,
said users in the evaluation stage should
think about including 64-bit testing. Win 7
supports both 32-bit and 64-bit processors.
“The bottom line is that at some point in
the next five years you very likely will be
moving to a 64-bit operating environment
and Windows 7 may be the right time to
make the move,” Kleynhans wrote in his
blog. “At the very least everyone should
include one 64-bit environment in their
testing matrix. While it may not be the right
time to make the move, it is certainly the
right time to start preparing for the inevitable
64-bit shift.”
Gartner polled 400 attendees to one of
its recent Webcasts and found 34 percent
planned to mostly deploy 32-bit, while 13
percent were planning mostly on 64-bit.
The other 52 percent were undecided.
Forrester’s Gray said there are a number
of wild cards that could influence the ebb
and flow of upgrades. He thinks the vast
majority of upgrades will tie into the natural
PC refresh cycle, “so if users are not buying
PCs they will not be buying Windows 7.”
Gartner predicts that Win 7 will have
minimal impact on worldwide PC sales
from October through December.
In addition, Gray said organizations that
are embracing Windows Server 2008 R2
are likely to move faster to Win 7 in order
to take advantage of features that work with
the server such as Branch Cache and Direct
Access. 3
newsbites
IBM: Enhanced storage
virtualization gear
The latest version of IBM’s SAN
Volume Controller will enable enterprise
users to put solid-state devices
inside the SVC, promising a huge
performance boost with or without
flash storage. The SVC 5.0 also
has upgrades that will enhance the
performance of hard disk drives in the
virtualized storage environment.
Avaya: UC for SMBs
Avaya has launched the Aura System
Platform, a mid-sized, single-server
unified communications product that
is designed for companies with as
few as 100 employees. The product is
scalable, however, and can support up
to 2,400 users in 250 locations. It uses
standards-based virtualization technology
for real-time communications.
Enterasys upgrades
Ethernet switches
Enterasys has upgraded its Ethernet
switch line via the introduction of the
S-Series switches, which are targeted
for converged networks, including the
heavily virtualized ones. The S-Series
promises an almost fourfold boost in
switching capacity and a tenfold increase
in throughput as compared with
its predecessor, the N-Series. The S-
Series also features a 10G port density
and comes with improved policy-based
security features.
8 Computerworld Hong Kong Nov 2009 www.cw.com.hk