Companies opening to Vista alternatives
Results of a survey released this week, Windows Vista Adoption and Alternatives: A Survey of Technology Professional, found what many open source supporters had long suspected - Vista is driving more companies away from Microsoft than it is attracting.
, was to gather data about the perceived impact of Vista on IT organisations, and specifically their operating system adoption strategies
In compiling the data, 961 IT professionals responded to the survey, with a mix of front-line IT professionals, IT managers, and IT executives.
Of those surveyed, a whopping 90% reported concerns about migrating to Vista, with 53% of participants having no plans to deploy Vista at this time.
Although it might be suspected that, with these results, those surveyed were supporters of other operating systems, 99% percent of respondents operated Windows in their work environments.
Alternative choices
The percentage of companies that said they had considered implementing a non-Windows alternative was just short of half at 44%, and of those 9% were already in the process of migrating away from Windows.
The most popular alternative operating system was Macintosh, with 28% of those considering a migration choosing it. This was followed by Red Hat (23%), SUSE Linux (18%), Ubuntu (18%) and other Linux
operating systems (9%).
This meant that across the various distributions, Linux operating systems racked up more than two-thirds at 68%. The remainder was accounted for by 4% of those considering alternatives not being sure which operating system to adopt.
Challenges to overcome
Those who were interested in switching to an alternative operating system reported several challenges to migration. The challenges most commonly encountered were those of users' familiarity with Windows and difficulty in managing non-Windows systems.
Of those reporting challenges in managing non-Windows OSs, 40% cited the need to obtain the necessary expertise to manage multiple systems and 50% viewed the need to purchase and learn a different set of management tools as a challenge to be overcome.
Another key obstacle to migration was the fact that 60% of the respondents managed their Windows with tools that were only supported on Windows.
These challenges to system management saw 45% of the respondents saying that they were prevented from migrating away from Windows.
However progress in virtualisation tools has done well for Linux and Macintosh, with 67% of the survey's participants reporting that the use of virtualised environments has made it easier to implement alternative operating systems.
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