Windows 7 to deliver on its promises
The launch at SFO was just superb with the amazing energy brought in by Robert Youngjohns and Steve Ballmer during their opening sessions, panel discussions and the question answer sessions. Some of the leaders from the early adopters of the Microsoft technologies viz. Intel, Ford, Continental Airlines and Star Wood Hotel shared their views and how their organization see the benefits of adopting these technologies. The paradigm of ‘New Efficiency’ – the terminology used by Microsoft is bound to drive the organizations to improve productivity and innovation by getting more out of organization’s resources and creating new revenue streams by unlocking creativity. All this while the new technologies from Microsoft help pulling cost out of operations i.e. with less doing more. The demo at the event showed the robustness of the three products and how they help improve the productivity in the organization. Some of the features of Windows 7 besides the cool UI, simpler, easier & faster operation, higher responsiveness; seamless access to corporate resources in trusted and secure way without the VPN are amazing from the perspective of mobile workforce. Federated search, security features like bit locker, policy compliance tools, secured browsing with IE8 and PC management leveraging application & desktop virtualization with higher level of control and automation provide the perfect recipe for the organization to bring in new efficiencies.
The preparation of business case and demonstrating the ROI to business and IT for migration to new OS platform had been always a challenge and to address this the stakeholders be it business, IT, Microsoft, vendor for migration and users have to work in tandem. The proposition of Windows 7 for saving $90- $160 per PC per annum (based on the study and assessment from Microsoft) is very compelling. The actual benefit would vary for different organizations based on multiple factors like complexity, application environment, previous investments in Vista, infrastructure optimization maturity, etc. However one thing is sure that there are benefits which organizations must make take advantage of and embark on Windows 7 migration roadmap sooner than later to gain new normal faster than the competition.
