Most Capital Markets Firms Are Not Ready to Deploy Microsoft’s Vista Operating System

Microsoft's new Windows operating system, Vista, was released in November. Although Citigroup announced its intention to deploy Vista on 360,000 desktops this summer, most capital markets firms, while evaluating the new OS, are not quite ready for a major rollout.

In an exclusive interview with WS&T, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, "The financial services customers we've talked to that have done early evaluation and adoption programs with us are finding a variety of great reasons to upgrade to Vista and Office 2000 in their infrastructure. First is user interface and user friendliness -- they benefit by drawing people in to do more with the computing capabilities available. Second is compliance and security issues. Third is the ability to take cost out of the infrastructure."

A few days after our interview, Ballmer told financial analysts that sales forecasts for Vista may be "overly aggressive" -- that lower selling prices, limited new corporate sales and software piracy may combine to temper Vista sales forecasts.

In a recent report, "Keep Testing, Expect Changes," Gartner says, "For most organizations, we believe 12 to 18 months of testing, planning and piloting will be required before mainstream Vista and Office 2007 deployment begins. Organizations need to understand their software inventory, do internal testing, and work with independent software vendors to understand their support policies and time lines." <<<