Half of American Corporate Machines Unprepared for Vista

Hardware upgrades will act as a break on the Windows Vista adoption rate. The operating system's deployment rate is strictly dependent on the existing hardware configurations. This because if the upgrades to Windows Vista have to be correlated with hardware upgrades, the inherent costs may prove prohibitive for members of the corporate ecosystems.

Softchoice Research has performed a market study on the North American market and determined that approximately 50% of business machines are underequipped, not meeting the minimum requirements for Vista, and therefore unable to run the operating system. Softchoice Research's data additionally revealed that a total of 94% of the 112,113 desktops from 472 North American institutions surveyed fail to meet the system requirements for Windows Vista Ultimate.

"Ultimately, the rate at which the average business CPU's MHz rating is increasing has not kept pace with Vista: The CPU requirements for Vista have increased 243 percent from those of Windows XP, whereas the speed of the average business PC's CPU has only increased by 215 percent over roughly the same time period," said Softchoice services consultant Dean Williams.

In comparison, when Windows XP was released, in excess of 71% of the computers in the corporate environment could successfully deploy the operating system. This means that while Microsoft is planning to push Vista on no less than 20% of the business desktops by the end of the first year since the deployment, Vista upgrades will be integrated simultaneously with hardware upgrades. And it is general practice in the business environment to deploy hardware upgrades into cycles of three to five years.

"Most organizations planning to deploy Vista within the next two years will have a PC life cycle that is affected by these factors, which, taken together, present a significant operational and financial stumbling block if not planned for well ahead of time. While these findings suggest that many organizations are considering a longer-term deployment schedule, the hardware purchasing decisions made today will undoubtedly impact the viability of a Vista rollout in the coming years," Williams added.