Gartner: Vista Won't Significantly Decrease TCO

Michael Silver, Research VP at Gartner wrote in an entry on the Gartner Blog destined to Windows Vista that the influx of technology represented by the upcoming Microsoft operating system into corporate environments will not be sufficient to achieve a high standard of management and a consistent cost reduction. As Microsoft is introducing a strategy to push Vista into the corporate ecosystem, emphasizing the business side of the application in addition to the customer side, in order to catalyze the adoption of OS upgrades, the company is claiming a TCO reduction of 63%.

The Redmond Company is looking to deploy Windows Vista onto 20% of enterprise machines in the first year of availability. "One of the claims that Microsoft made to reporters was that Windows Vista will enable companies to manage their users better and reap the savings of better manageability in addition to any inherent savings Windows Vista provides. Although Microsoft's total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction claim (reducing IT operation costs from $542 to $202, or 63%) is probably aggressive to begin with (we estimate that moving from a typically managed to a locked and well-managed XP desktop can reduce IT operations costs from $576 to $377, or 34.5%," commented Silver. He also added that total costs of ownership do not include migration and management costs.