Forrester Says Business Finally Moving To Vista

Vista has been rejected by enterprises

In a research brief published last week, Forrester analyst Ben Gray cited research that shows businesses are finally beginning to adopt the much maligned operating system at a significant rate.

After gathering data on the desktop environments of some 50,000 clients from 2,500 companies who visited Forrester's homepage from Q4 2007 through Q2 2008, the Cambridge, Mass.-based research firm found that Vista users have increased from 5 percent to 8.8 percent in the past nine months.

In addition, a steadily growing number of Vista migrations are coming from XP-based PCs, as opposed to PCs running Windows 2000, according to Gray. He also noted that companies that choose to hold off on Vista migrations until Microsoft releases Windows 7 will be making a mistake.

"Desktop operations professionals are also increasingly realizing that the investments they make with Windows Vista today will ultimately pay off if and when they're ready to deploy Windows 7," Gray wrote. "IT managers must stay the course and migrate to Windows Vista sooner rather than later."

Vista migrations aren't as painful as some have made them out to be, but until recently, businesses didn't see a compelling reason to upgrade, said Todd Swank, vice president of marketing at Nor-Tech, a Burnsville, Minn.-based system builder.

However, "It has now been 18 months since Vista's release, and the issues have been addressed," Swank said.