14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft will officially discontinue Windows XP next month, so the company continues its efforts to make everyone aware that sticking to this platform is a very risky and dangerous decision.
Although many believe that time is running out for those still on XP, a British IT firm claims that it can migrate as many as 30,000 PCs running Windows XP to a newer version of Windows in no less than 30 days.
Migration specialist 1E told PC Pro in a statement that businesses can still step away from Windows XP in time for retirement with the proper upgrade software solutions.
The company claims that it helped US carrier Verizon to upgrade no less than 80,000 computers from Windows XP to Windows 7 and it managed to complete the transition of 30,000 systems in just one month.
“It took us a couple of months to get it all set up - but during that time, because of all [our] learnings, we were already migrating their machines,” Sumir Karayi Founder and CEO of the company, explained. “We ramped up to this speed of about 30,000 a month and right at the end, they were doing even more than that.”
It is all about the migration tools that companies are coming down to, Karayi explained, especially when having to upgrade more than just a single machine.
“How do you automate 100% of the [migration] tasks? That's the really big one,” said Karayi. “What happens is people automate 80% or 90% - but still have to send a person down to every desk. And as soon as you’ve done that, you’ve lost the battle.”
In the end, the whole process is quite a benefic investment, Karayi added, pointing out that many of the companies turning to automatic upgrade solutions could save quite a lot of money by avoiding to install Windows 7 manually on all systems.
“They had budget for doing all of it manually,” he said. “They saved $10 million just in... having people go round each machine.”
Windows XP is currently installed on approximately 29 percent of computers worldwide, with recent figures confirming that more users are actually moving to this platform than upgrading. Microsoft will start displaying upgrade notifications on Windows XP machines on March 8 in order to make sure that all those running this particular platform will be aware that end of support is coming.