Village Gamer

A new study from Softchoice Corporation indicates that the adoption of Microsoft Windows 7 has reached a tipping point – with installations of the operating system (OS) in corporate environments nearly tripling since the start of 2011.

An analysis of 1.6 million PCs representing more than 300 distinct organizations suggests that after a slow start in 2010, IT departments are now moving quickly to deploy the Microsoft OS. In January of 2011, roughly one in 10 PCs in the average environment had Windows 7 installed compared to almost one in three by the end of August. To put these findings into perspective, in the first two years of its launch, Vista was only deployed to three percent of total corporate PCs, compared to 18 percent and counting for Windows 7.

“In the span of less than a year we’ve seen organizations move from a cautious ‘wait and see’ mentality to rolling out Windows 7 pretty rapidly,” said Dean Williams, Manager of Assessment Services Development for Softchoice. “Given the activity of the past few quarters we’ve clearly reached a tipping point. This is a completely different picture than what we saw with the adoption of Vista.”

Although in the average environment 28 percent of corporate PCs have Windows 7 installed, only 10 percent of organizations are past the half-way point in rolling out the OS across their entire fleet. Analysis indicates that a full 60 percent of organizations are actively testing, if not in the process of deploying the OS. This suggests the rapid uptick in installations seen over the course of 2011 will continue to accelerate over the coming quarters.

“While only a handful of organizations may have reached the finish line in terms of full-scale deployments, most are well underway,” added Mr. Williams. “The momentum is clearly there.”

The findings are based on actual inventory data collected from 1.6 million corporate PCs between January and August of 2011. The sample consists of 306 unique organizations, representing a wide range of industries from across North America, including financial, health care, manufacturing and education.

The data collection for the study was made possible as a result of Softchoice’s award-winning IT assessment services. To provide comprehensive IT asset management services, including licensing gap analysis, hardware lifecycle and IT policy management, Softchoice receives IT inventory data from customer environments. A portion of this data was analyzed in aggregate to produce the findings pertaining to Windows 7 adoption among North American organizations.