Microsoft's campaign for Windows 7, its upcoming operating system and best hope to reverse its declining revenues, has kicked into high gear. Using a Redmond-sponsored Forrester report into enterprise IT problems, Microsoft is insisting to enterprises that adopting Windows 7 will streamline IT processes and save money over the long term. Microsofts case studies include the City of Miami, which supposedly used new Windows 7 capabilities to reduce its IT labor costs.A Microsoft-sponsored
Forrester Research report into the costs and
challenges of supporting IT workers has become the basis for Redmonds newest
push to support Windows 7, its upcoming operating system. Using the reports
data, which suggests that SMBs (small and midsize businesses) and the
enterprise are under assault by bloated corporate PC images, decentralization
problems and an overwhelming flood of help-desk calls, Microsoft is holding up
case studies it says show that Windows 7 can help mitigate many of these
issues.
With Labor Day in the rearview mirror and the new operating
systems release date of Oct. 22 ever closer, the push for Windows 7 has entered
high gear. On Sept. 1, Microsoft
announced the availability of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 through
Microsoft Volume License Resellers. To help speed the adoption of the
operating system, Redmond is also offering a six-month deal in which purchasers
of Windows 7 Professional upgrade will be entitled to a 15-percent price cut.
The Microsoft-commissioned Forrester report, which surveyed
318 IT professionals and conducted in-depth follow-up interviews with 10 of
them, had six key findings with regard to the challenges and costs facing IT
administrators in the enterprise:
Decentralization and Mobility
"Todays information works are highly decentralized and
mobile, which necessitates significant annual spending on connectivity and WAN
optimization services," the report read. "We learned that more than 3 out [of] 5
employees work outside of their organizations headquarters." Furthermore, the
enterprises surveyed had an average of 174 branch offices worldwide all of
which, of course, needed to be supported.
Bloated Corporate PC Images and Siloed
Processes
The surveyed organizations supported an average of 215
different applications worldwide not including legacy applications never
scrubbed from the companys IT infrastructure. "We also discovered that the
average user has 16 applications installed on their work PC, but this doesnt
take into account the proliferation of applications that some users install on
their own."
Help Desk Calls
Around one out of 7 monthly help-desk calls, Forrester found,
were due to users corrupting their PCs by installing unauthorized software. Some
23 percent of monthly help-desk calls were users requiring software
installations.
VPN-Related Issues
Roughly 10 percent of help desk calls were due to VPN-related
issues, a problem that stems from the increase in mobile and network
connectivity and the need for mobile workers to access data while on the
road.
Lack of Ability to Trace USB Thumb Drive Usage and
Theft
The surveyed firms lost an average of 55 PCs, with each PC
storing an average of 53 GB of corporate data. Around five percent of removable
storage devices were also lost or stolen every year.
Hard Drives with Lack of Optimization
The need to search hard-drives for data and documents wastes
time that could otherwise be utilized productively.
Furthermore, Forrester found that companies considered the
following to be a "critically or very important business
priority":
- Controlling Costs (87
percent)
- Improving Employee
Productivity (84 percent)
- Improving Employee Mobility
(54 percent)
Microsoft has now used that data as a basis to tout how
Windows 7 will allegedly solve many long-standing IT issues within the
enterprise, while also saving IT dollars. In a round of briefings between
Microsoft executives and the media, Redmond has been pushing three case studies
U.K.-based Baker Tilly, the City of Miami, and
Getronics as examples of early Windows 7 adopters who saw substantial benefits
from integrating the new operating system into their IT
infrastructure.
With regard to the City of Miami, Microsoft has been claiming
that the adoption of Windows 7 saved the government $54 per PC per year in power
savings. Redmond also said, in both briefings and a press release circulated to
media, that Windows 7 capabilities such as Remote Desktop have saved labor costs
on the part of city IT staff, reducing the need to dispatch technicians to user
locations by as much as 90 percent.
Redmond also cites the experience of Baker Tilly, claiming
that the company saved 18 percent of PC management costs due to the deployment
of Windows 7. Microsoft estimates that the direct cost savings of IT labor
dedicated to PC management will be in the range of $89 to $160 annually, a
figure that can also be expressed as IT pros saving up to two hours of labor per
desktop annually.
Windows 7 has become Microsofts perhaps most-vital pillar in
its quest to
reverse a trend in declining revenues. For the fourth fiscal quarter of
2009, Redmond reported a decline of 17 percent in year-over-year revenue,
earning $13.10 billion for the quarter roughly $1 billion below Wall Street
estimates.
In the face of this decline, Microsoft has revised its
corporate strategy to focus on a number of key upcoming products, including
Windows 7 and Office 2010. Historically, roughly a third of Microsofts annual
income has come from operating-system sales. Companies within its ecosystem have
joined in the push, with Intel
suggesting publicly throughout the summer that the rollout of Windows 7 will
prompt a massive corporate tech refresh.
In order to further compel SMBs the enterprise to upgrade,
Microsoft has taken steps such as offering a 90-day free trial edition of
Windows 7 Enterprise to IT administrators and other professionals. That trial
edition, which is available in both 32- and 64-bit versions and a variety of
languages, can be downloaded here.