Time and complexity are putting UK IT managers off migrating their organisation onto Microsoft's Vista operating system.
New research has found nearly half of IT managers (49 percent) will take more than 12 months to fully migrate their organisation onto Vista — once preparation, testing, rollout and post-migration issues have all been taken into account.
David Bradshaw, analyst at Ovum, said: "It is a big project to go onto Vista. I'm not entirely surprised by [the research]. That's the kind of timescale I would expect."
A further 45 percent say the whole process would take six months or more, with just six percent saying the process would take less than three months.
Just three percent of respondents said they are planning to migrate their corporate systems onto Vista immediately.
As well as time, the sheer complexity of migration was cited by 62 percent of IT managers as putting them off a move to Vista.
The research also shows IT staff are concerned about post migration issues such as downtime — leading to loss of productivity — and user questions about personal settings or applications wasting support-staff time.
Because of this, Bradshaw suggested, IT departments may wait for staff to start using Vista at home to reduce the number of user issues emerging following migration. However, some companies such as Tesco.com have already taken the plunge and migrated to Vista.
The research was carried out by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Enteo Software and covered 100 IT managers from companies of 1,000 employees or more.
