Gartner Finds Windows 10 Enterprise Adoption Taking Off

A Gartner study finds that Windows 10 is winning strong support from both business and home computer users. Here are key findings from that report.

Although there are some companies that have started to move to Windows 10, the main thrust of that migration hasn’t begun. According to Gartner, 50 percent of companies will at least have started their migration to Windows 10 by January 2017. By the first half of 2016, those companies will have their plans in place to start deploying the operating system.

Interestingly, consumer demand for Windows 10 is proving to be a driving force for its enterprise adoption. According to Gartner, companies are noticing that consumers feel comfortable with Windows 10. Those same consumers are often corporate employees. If they feel comfortable with an operating system, they are going to be more productive. Consumer interest is an important consideration for companies nowadays, and Windows 10 is benefiting from that.

Although Windows 7 and Windows XP experienced a rather rapid upgrade cycle before it, Windows 10’s deployment will be even more rapid, according to Gartner. The research firm says that once enterprises get their deployment plans in place, IT won’t wait too long to get Windows 10 running on as many computers as their budgets will permit.

Microsoft made a smart decision by announcing that it will stop supporting Windows 7 in January 2020. Microsoft is taking no chances that Win 7 will hang around anywhere near as long as the popular Windows XP did in the world’s homes and offices. Absent the end-of-support deadline, it’s hard to say how long it would take companies to migrate to Windows 10.

Over the years, enterprise adoption has always been hampered by application compatibility. If critical applications, especially custom businesses, don’t run on new platforms, enterprises will not migrate until they do. With Windows 10, however, it’s much less of an issue. The vast majority of applications that require Windows 7 or Windows 8 will work just fine on Windows 10, making it an appealing option to companies, according to Gartner.

Several research firms have said that there is growing demand for two-in-one hybrids in the enterprise. Gartner says that companies will invest heavily to get hybrids into employees’ hands, and nearly all of these models will be running Windows 10 when they are delivered from the factory.

Enterprises will deploy Windows 10 even as they adopt other application platforms, such as the cloud and browser-based applications. Gartner believes that by 2019 between 20 and 30 percent of enterprise applications will require Windows, a percentage that is lower than in the past 10 or 15 years. All others will either be platform-agnostic or running in the cloud, but Windows 10 will be the platform that enterprises support to run the vast majority of desktop applications, Gartner says.

Touch screens are expected to become a standard feature in a large number of Windows PCs in the coming years. In fact, Gartner believes one-third of all notebooks will ship with touch screens by 2018. While the enterprise has historically been tepid on touch screens, it’s starting to warm to the idea. Since Microsoft contends that Windows 10 has delivered better touch-screen performance than any previous Windows version, the influx of touch displays will only add more momentum to corporate adoption of the new version.

For a moment, Gartner moved away from its talk of Windows 10 to share another interesting data point about corporate computing. Gartner found that by 2018, 30 percent of all companies will spend more money on big-screen, high-resolution displays for employees than on the computers they’re connected to. It’s part of a broader “new employee workspace” that is being heavily affected by mobile devices, touch screens and, yes, Windows 10 deployment.

Most enterprises will have completed the migration to Windows 10 by 2019, Gartner says. While there may be a few laggards who want to hold on to Windows 7 or Windows 8 until the expiration of Microsoft corporate support, Gartner believes most companies will act to have their entire operations running entirely on Windows 10 in 2019.