New Migration Tool Seeks To Spur Adoption Of Windows 7

More than a year after its introduction, Windows 7 adoption is at only 10 percent in the enterprise market. Prowess, a maker of software to simplify migration, is improving its tools to accomplish increased adoption of Windows 7, even as its CEO expresses skepticism at industry optimism that 2011 may be "The Year of Windows 7."

Prowess introduced on Tuesday the latest version of its SmartDeploy Enterprise software deployment toolkit, which creates a virtual disk image of Windows 7, associated software and other configuration settings and then replicates that image to servers and desktop computers on the network. It works with any version of Windows, such as XP or Windows Server 2003 and 2008; 32-bit or 64-bit versions of the operating systems; and it supports a variety of virtualization environments. It is designed to address some of the obstacles that go along with migrating to a new OS, such as compatibility with older versions of software or differences in hardware, says Aaron Suzuki, CEO of Prowess.

Forrester Research said in a November 2010 outlook on Windows 7 adoption that while only 10 percent of PCs in North America and Europe run the newest version of the OS, there are promising signs of a pickup. For one, 31 percent of new PCs being installed by IT managers run Windows 7. Forrester anticipates that within a year that number will grow to 83 percent.

While Suzuki concurs that hardware refresh cycles will be a big driver of Windows 7 adoption, he still thinks that "wide-scale deployment of Windows 7 is a lot further out than a lot of people think. Our customers do not seem to be in any hurry."

Suzuki says one of the factors limiting migration is that some independent software vendors (ISVs) are slow to update their applications to be compatible with Windows 7 or to make their images "Windows 7-ready" to be included in a migration project. While sensing this market reluctance, Prowess is doing its part to encourage adoption by pointing out features of its SmartDeploy Migration, such as single instance storage.The Windows application Notepad, which creates simple text documents, appears three times in Windows XP, for example, but in a SmartDeploy image of XP,  Notepad would only be recorded once. However, when it's installed, it's copied three times. The Windows 7 image created by SmartDeploy also includes the drivers needed for the chosen configuration, and only those drivers, says Suzuki, for more efficient use of image disk space.

Prowess is also making migration easier with a unique pricing model, says Suzuki. SmartDeploy Enterprise pricing starts at $2,295 per technician, rather than the traditional per server node. Per technician pricing means that a company can buy one license, and then one technician on their IT staff can deploy it to an unlimited number of end users. Customer can  judge for themselves how many licenses they want to buy based on how may technicians they want on a deployment project and how much time they want to take to roll it out. A deployment of 1,000 seats could be done with one license;  a deployment to 5,000 seats could be done with three licenses; and a deployment of tens of thousands of seats could be done with, perhaps, 10 licenses.

Other drivers of wider Windows 7 adoption may include the growing popularity of new Web browsers, new office productivity suites like Office 2010 and improved security features, says Forrester.

An analysis by IDC shortly after Windows 7 came out stated that adoption could increase as IT managers realize the performance advantages of the new OS versus what they are running now. For most applications, Windows 7 has lower actual system resource requirements than its predecessor, Windows Vista, and comes close to matching the CPU and RAM consumption of XP, IDC reported. While new hardware being installed today will likely run Windows 7, the new OS could be installed in older hardware without a loss in performance.

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