Attitudes

 
 
By Christine Ewing  |  Posted 2011-03-04 Email Print this article Print
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


Attitudes

The survey respondents came from 16 different countries worldwide and had anywhere from five to 10,000 employees. They were asked how long a company should wait before upgrading to a brand new operating system? To avoid the issues and bugs that often come to the first users of an operating system, most of these IT professionals recommended waiting six months to one year after the release to migrate. Only eight percent of the respondents immediately migrated to Windows 7. There are a number of ways to determine the best time to migrate.

"We usually wait a significant amount of time for things to stabilize," said one respondent, an IT director at a midsize enterprise. "Sometimes that's a service pack, sometimes it's a significant number of patches, and sometimes it's the industry-when other companies of large scale migrate."

Actually, very few respondents said that they would wait for a particular service pack before making the upgrade. Specific motivations for these companies' migrations varied from increased performance and reliability to user experience and better security. Plus, their return on investment was significant: 62 percent set ROI goals and 90 percent of those achieved their ROI goals.

The same IT director said, "We felt that the cost to migrate to Windows 7 was a bit steep, but if you look at the TCO, it's actually a great investment. Even though it cost our company a lot of money to make the migration, it was well worth the investment. It was much better than anything we had seen from Vista or XP."




 
 
 
 
Christine Ewing is Director of Product Marketing for the Endpoint Management group at Symantec. Christine has more than 12 years of experience in IT software product management and marketing. In her role at Symantec, Christine is responsible for identifying and analyzing market trends and working with the product management team to create market-driven products. In addition to being a seasoned product marketing manager, Christine has held a number of product management roles inside of Symantec, where she delivered new technologies to the market and managed existing endpoint management products. Prior to her current role in marketing, Christine was a senior product manager for the Endpoint Management group at Symantec and at Altiris (before it was acquired by Symantec in 2007). Before joining Symantec/Altiris, Christine held positions at Compaq and Thermo Electron, working in various roles of engineering, product management and marketing. Christine holds a Bachelor's degree in Chemistry and History from Northwestern University. She can be reached at christine_ewing@symantec.com.
 
 
 
 
 
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