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February 21, 2000

Behind The Numbers:
Businesses Are Open To Windows 2000

hether you're jumping on the early adopter express or catching the last train to the Windows 2000 station, chances are good that someday a considerable sum of your budget will ride on the installation of Microsoft's new operating system.

Data from a recent InformationWeek Research survey shows that many IT managers are unabashedly enthusiastic about adopting Windows 2000 Professional, Server, and Advanced Server editions, and are looking for relatively quick payback scenarios.

What remains to be seen is whether the operating system will reduce computer operating costs, boost worker productivity, and, most important, stand as a reliable pillar of enterprise data centers.

Nearly three-quarters of the 200 IT managers with operating-systems responsibility polled this month plan to deploy Windows 2000 widely on the desktop within 12 months of its release date. Of companies with deployment plans, nearly half say they'll test the system on desktops and servers by the end of December.

Support for Windows 2000 was strong early on and remains strong at launch. In a similar survey conducted in July 1999, 74% of respondents said they were planning a wide deployment of Windows 2000 Professional within a year of its release, and 68% said their first-year plans included a wide deployment on servers.

Yet customers and analysts say key features of the operating system could give IT departments fits without proper planning. Chief among these is the Active Directory, which introduces to Windows the concept of tracking and updating users, groups, and their machines in a centralized directory service, rather than across multiple domains. Successful migration of organizational data to the Active Directory can speed new applications to market, and lower a company's total cost of ownership, Microsoft argues. Yet consultants say poorly planned systems will wreak havoc instead of solve problems.

Is your company on the fast track to Windows 2000 deployment, or is it still circling the wagons? Let us know at the address below.

Own the data behind InformationWeek Research. See our available reports at informationweek.com/reports
Aaron Ricadela
Senior Editor
aricadel@cmp.com

This week in Behind The Numbers:

Always a Catch

Acid Test

Installment Plan

Crunching the Numbers

Always a Catch

One-third of companies say they'll widely deploy Windows 2000 Professional on desktops within six months of its release; 35% say their plans call for wide server-side rollouts during that span.

Small companies are even more aggressive: 10% of companies with less than $100 million in annual revenue plan to deploy Windows 2000 Professional upon its release, compared with 3% of companies with $1 billion or more in revenue, and 2% of midsize businesses, additional data shows.

The catch? IT shops at smaller companies will spend a lot less money on these early deployments than their peers at larger companies.

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Acid Test

The timing of Windows 2000 deployment at many companies may have less to do with compatibility and more to do with whether their IT staffs are up to speed.

According to the InformationWeek Research survey, 5% of Windows administrators (on average) are certified for Windows 2000, though that number is expected to increase to 34% by year's end.

Windows NT-savvy administrators enjoy an edge in implementing a system that may present a steep learning curve to many others. One example is a tool that lets IT administrators remotely distribute customized images of the operating system and user apps to PCs throughout their companies.

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Installment Plan

Not only will Windows 2000 make a loud splash when it shows up on your PCs, it's likely to flood your budget over an extended period as well. In all, 81% of respondents say they expect to incur most of their Windows 2000 upgrade expenses over more than one quarter, compared with 19% who say they'll take a one-quarter hit.

One-third of IT managers say they expect their total cost of ownership to decrease this year with Windows 2000, and 40% say it will remain the same. The outlook becomes even more optimistic two years from now: 47% of respondents expect a total-cost-of-ownership drop by 2002, while 35% expect no change.

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Crunching the Numbers

For all the total-cost-of-ownership benefits Microsoft is pitching Windows 2000 customers, only 27% of IT managers say they've arrived at a per-PC cost estimate for migrating to the new operating system. That number suggests many early adopters haven't studied the cost issues. An additional 39% say "not yet." IT managers who've budgeted their cost per machine put the figure at an average of $400, excluding hardware. It gets more expensive with more PCs, though. The median estimate for upgrade costs is $200 per PC at small companies, $400 at midsize businesses, and $450 at large companies.

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