Business Desktops

The day that many of us have been waiting for has come: the official launch of Microsoft Windows 7 and general availability (GA) for consumer customers. What this means is that PC manufacturers like Dell can begin shipping systems with Windows 7 on them. Of course, large corporations and other enterprises have had beta programs in place for some time now so last week's announcement was very much focused on consumers' use of Windows 7. Microsoft hosted events in New York and elsewhere, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer himself spent more than five minutes with Matt Lauer on The Today Show touting the benefits of Windows 7, but again heavily focused on consumers. In my view, Windows 7 is a given for consumers as almost all PCs will ship with it.

What I want to talk about today is why large companies should look at Windows 7. The enterprise is where the real decision is to be made and I think there are good reasons for corporations to begin the switch.

Dell recently did a survey of Federal IT decision-makers with the 1105 Government Information Group about their Windows 7 adoption. It’s not surprising that 72 percent reported their organizations did not adopt Windows Vista. Many of those organizations are likely running Windows XP and some may even be running Windows 2000.

Forrester Research published a report of their own recently, “Windows 7 Commercial Adoption Outlook,” that provides quite a few tips for migrating to the new OS. The report points out that about 79 percent of PCs used by small-to-medium businesses are still running Windows XP; that is in-line with our research in the federal space.

There have been a great number of comparisons of the new OS to Windows Vista as well as Windows XP. Many are suggesting that Windows 7 is very similar to XP so I'm sure many CIOs in large enterprises are wondering why make the switch at all. After all, no one in IT gets promoted for forcing an OS switch on their company’s workforce.

I think we all know how the current economic situation has led to a very frugal approach to IT spending. However, keeping laptops and desktops in circulation for more than four years can lead to higher maintenance and energy costs, and can reduce employee productivity. According to IDC, IT organizations may be incurring operating costs as much as 20.5 percent higher than necessary to acquire, manage and decommission their desktop and notebook PC equipment when comparing tightly managed three-year life cycles with less systematic, longer-span life cycle management strategies.

Also, J. Gold Associates says that keeping a laptop in circulation for years four and five can cost organizations $9,600 in lost end-user productivity and the cost to fix a laptop not under warranty can reach $1,425.

To provide evidence of lost employee productivity, Dell commissioned a performance study that compares current Latitude laptops products to similar models that are three and four years old. Examples of the results include:

• The battery life of a Latitude E4300 laptop running Windows 7 is up to 85 percent longer than a Latitude D620, a 3-year-old system, running Windows XP;
• The Latitude E6400 running Windows 7 offers up to 63 percent better performance than a Latitude D620 running Windows XP;
•  With a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop you can reduce boot time by up to 29 percent compared to a previous generation Latitude laptop.

(Details on all of these claims are available in the footnotes here.)

So, aside from all the cost, performance and enhanced features of Windows 7 as a motivator to migrate, there's also the news that Microsoft has finally announced an end-date to the support they'll offer for Windows XP. According to the Microsoft Support site, Windows XP will enter its “extended support’ phase on July 7, 2010 with extended support ultimately ending in April 2014. While that seems a long way off, many analyst firms are urging large enterprises to begin their migration planning now as it takes time to assess your applications and determine what your roll-out plan is. So, it seems that migration isn’t so much of a “will we” question, but more of a “when will we” question.

Dell recently announced Dell’s a Windows 7 Readiness Assessment to identify application compatibility, hardware compatibility and migration readiness and to provide the recommendations needed to help make your transition to Windows 7 as smooth as possible. But applications are but one part of the migration process. We're making available to you a webcast entitled "Preparing for Windows 7 Migration" that discusses just how a corporation conduct such a significant migration. Here are a few other issues that need IT staffs need to consider:

• Determining application compatibility including your Web applications;
• What new system imaging and deployment technologies are there to consider;
• Deciding how new virtualization technologies should be leveraged;
• Determining whether to deploy 32-bit or 64-bit versions of the OS;
• Dealing with extensive amounts of user data that will need to be migrated;
• Handling a more distributed workforce with a larger number of devices;
• Training both IT and end-users

We'd be eager to hear your thoughts on your organization. What are your migration plans? Do you plan to do a wholesale of all your clients at one time or stagger it out? What's the primary operating system you'll be migrating from? Do our numbers above match with your environment?

The Windows 7 team at Dell is excited about the progress we have made to get the OS ready for commercial customers and is looking forward to launch in just a couple of short months!  Effective August 7, 2009 MSDN, TechNet and Volume License Customers with Software Assurance can begin deploying the new operating system.  We have received many requests from our business customers that we post our Windows 7 drivers so they can begin testing and qualifying the new OS within their environments.

We've listened and recently, we have started posting Dell Certified Windows 7 drivers at www.support.dell.com/Windows7  where you will find the first set of drivers for many of our commercial systems.  

We will post additional drivers once they pass rigorous testing and certification standards--please check back if there is something you don't see.  For customers without dedicated IT staff interested in evaluating Windows 7, check out Windows Update.

Our services staff is also ready to help customers with the transition to Windows 7.  We have a number of deployment tools and services for businesses and institutions to make the migration from Windows XP, which is what most commercial customers are running, to Windows 7 easier.  ProConsult services that help customers understand how to best to deploy the new operating system, along with determining which features of the OS will benefit your business the most.  After deployment, our ProSupport and ProManage services can help administer and support systems throughout their lifecycle.

Well, soon anyway. Microsoft has said that they will RTM (release to manufacturer) gold code to the market by the end of this month. There are several folks talking about Windows 7 (Win7), so I won't go too deep into the OS itself. Brandon and team at Microsoft have done a great job of chronicling the developments and features of Windows.

I will say however, that I have been running the Win7 release candidate on my home computer and can tell you that it is rocks! It's fast, nimble, stable, etc. Our engineering and development teams have been working really closely with Microsoft to get the OS ready. We're already working with early adopter customers to deploy Win7 and their feedback is overwhelmingly positive. I'm happy to report that I've have been accepted into Dell's Win7 early adopter program and can't wait to get it on my machine!

What we find interesting about our commercial customers is that 86 percent of commercial customers are still using XP, according to Forrester. This presents a unique challenge for IT departments as XP is now 8 years old and customers are looking at a “skip-generation” upgrade to Windows 7 (read: clean wipe of the hard drive).

The first step in any software deployment is planning. As with any software deployment it is important to look at application compatibility. Customers must be able to understand what is compatible, what isn’t and how they remediate? Do they keep low-use applications? Will the way they package their applications be compatible with the OS? These are all questions customers need to understand the answers to. We can help them with our global Application Compatibility Factory that will help them get to the answers they need.

From there we help them assess, design and implement their deployments.   Rather than throwing a bunch of suits at the problem, Dell ProConsult services offerings utilize electronic discovery, Web based surveys, best practices, comparative data, reference architectures and logic to offer customers shorter, more impactful consulting engagements. 

We're pumped about Win7 - I haven't run into a single person within Dell that isn't. It's now time for us to get to work and help our customers make the transition.

Recently, I went to lunch with some great folks from Liaison Resources, a local creative and marketing staffing firm. They provided me with a contractor that has worked on my team for over a year now, and she’s stellar. That said, I gather that finding stellar workers isn’t always easy to pull off. I heard some pretty interesting stories about sloppy applications and even sloppier wardrobe choices. Some of the stories made me laugh and others made me really glad I wasn’t challenged with the things they face on a regular basis.

Soon after I got back to the office, I saw a new case study on Hays Recruitment, a firm that also provides permanent, temporary or interim staff, but on a global scale. I gave the story a read and learned that they face a lot of the same types of challenges I had just heard about in person – only bigger because of their size and worldwide reach. They need to be able to quickly access in-depth information on potential candidates so they can keep pace with last year’s achievement of placing nearly 400,000 temporary and permanent workers. 

To access that information quickly, Hays chose to refresh their aging, slow desktop infrastructure with a standardized environment on Dell OptiPlex desktops with Hardware Customization and ProSupport. And it was no small task. 2,500 PCs had to be replaced and another 2,000 refreshed throughout 250 remote offices. But it was well worth it. Not only do employees now have quicker, more efficient access to their data and to one another, but hardware calls to the IT helpdesk are down by 40 percent and they are saving 75 percent on maintenance costs. Cool.

I know recruiters aren’t always perfect, but it was awesome to hear about both a small/local and a large/global agency getting a lot of stuff right. Let me hear your staffing stories, temporary, permanent, good or bad. They’re almost always entertaining!

Like me, you’ve probably noticed a lot of news lately on client virtualization. From new virtualization software and graphics technology by Citrix, to the delivery of an open source client from VMware, there’s definitely no shortage of buzz.

Perhaps because of this buzz, one of my colleagues this week asked me, “Are we witnessing the death of the PC desktop?"

Wow! There is a question that makes you stop and think.

My short answer is no. We’re simply looking at the latest in a series of evolutionary steps that will reshape the way IT thinks of the desktop. Ultimately, I don’t think that we, as end users, will know or care if our desktop is virtual. Let me tell you why.

Revolution or Evolution?

Let’s start by looking at what has happened in the data center. It wasn’t that long ago that server virtualization was the latest rage in IT - in fact, Dell talked about it a bit at last week's IT Executive Summit for our customers. Now that a large number of companies have virtualized their server and storage infrastructure, we are seeing reports of significant ROI. For example, by utilizing server virtualization and other cost saving data center techniques, our own IT department was able to cut operating costs by approximately $29 million and we were able to avoid building a new data center.

CIOs look at this kind of savings and they have to wonder what kind of efficiencies they can they gain on the client side.

As a result, 2009 is shaping up to be the “Year of the Pilot.” A substantial number of our customers are experimenting with or adopting virtualization for portions of their client infrastructure.

Why launch a pilot now? A few industry developments have converged to create the “next step” conditions for there to be an evolution in client management:

• Data center consolidation and server virtualization are allowing us to centralize both storage and, where appropriate, computing resources.

• New technologies are enabling the delivery of a true PC desktop to a variety of devices – we are not talking about a terminal service anymore. And as mentioned previously, virtualization software is evolving to address the issues of scalability, graphics performance, and data center resources that have been sticking points for customers in the past.

• Lastly, client virtualization using a true “bare metal” hypervisor is just around the corner. This will offer a key component for Flexible Computing that will enable what we like to call “one image, any device.” Bare metal hypervisors promise to simplify image management and enable the disconnected use of virtual clients, critical for mobile usage models.

We expect that new client hypervisor technologies will find their way into production networks in the latter half of 2009. When that happens, the game officially changes and we expect to see the market move from pilots to broad-based rollouts.

So what now?

This is the year to get educated and prepare for the coming change. In the next 18-24 months, the way we build, manage, and deploy clients will enter into the next stage of its evolution. If you want to hear more, I’ve posted a series of short videos about Flex Computing, available here. Also, in future posts we’ll examine some of the environments and usage models where the traditional PC is, and may always be, the preferred choice.

For now, though, let me leave you with this thought. The era of “one size fits all” computing is at an end, and the era of “one image, any device” is at hand. Personally I’m excited at the prospect of true synergy between virtual and traditional PCs, what do you think?