Windows 7 Deployments Gaining Momentum

After an almost ten-year reign of Windows XP, it looks like Windows 7 is finally starting to gain traction among the corporate crowd.

A recent study released by consulting firm Softchoice found only a small number of organizations already running Windows 7 but a large number currently in the midst of a Windows 7 deployment.

Analyzing 1.6 million PCs among 306 different companies in North America from January through August, Softchoice (News - Alert) learned that just 7 percent of the organizations had completed their move to Windows 7 by summer’s end. But 21 percent were more than halfway through their migrations and 13 percent had installed the OS on less than a quarter of their PCs.

However, a full 59 percent had already started to deploy Windows 7 and were somewhere less than 10 percent to the finish line.

Looking at the more than 1 million PCs included in the study, 28 percent were running Windows 7 in August, compared with only 8 percent in January 2011. In contrast, 71 percent of the PCs examined were running Windows XP in August versus 83 percent in January, while 2 percent were outfitted with Vista in August versus 8 percent in January.

And Softchoice’s data was recorded in August, so the numbers are certainly much higher at this point.

Other studies have pointed to the growth of Windows 7 since the OS made its debut more than two years ago. The monthly stats from Net Applications reveal the rise in Windows 7 over the past year at the same time that Windows XP and Vista have fallen in use.

And of course, all new PCs since the fall of 2009 have shipped with Windows 7. But as Softchoice points out, PCs shipped to businesses are often “retrofitted” with a different OS.

In my IT days, the PCs that we ordered from our vendor typically came with the current flavor of Windows. We then replaced that with our own customized and standard image of Windows, which was sometimes one version behind. Many organizations that have been ordering new PCs over the past year or two likely downgraded them from Windows 7 to Windows XP.

Ironically, the growing move to Windows 7 comes at a time that Windows 8 is due to surface sometime next year. But Microsoft (News - Alert) itself has advised organizations still stuck on XP not to wait for Windows 8 and instead make the leap to Windows 7. As the folks in Redmond have been repeating, Windows XP will no longer be supported after April 2014. That means XP will no longer receive updates, bug fixes, or security patches, leaving machines running that OS vulnerable.

And though April 2014 is more than two years away, all IT pros know that planning and completing a migration can take a fair chunk of time. Organizations still on XP would run into a definite time crunch if they waited for Windows 8.

We all know that any Windows migration takes a lot of time, money, people, and resources, all of which can be in short supply these days. But we also know that the need to move to a new version of Windows periodically is a fact of life in IT, especially if we want to keep the operating system fully updated and fully supported. So it’s good to see that more organizations are jumping onto the Windows 7 bandwagon.