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Gartner estimates the migration cost per PC: $1,205 and $1,999

“Prepare for Your Windows 7 Migration Crunch" by Gartner's Managing VP Charles Smulders

“Prepare for Your Windows 7 Migration Crunch"

August 26, 2010 by Managing VP Charles Smulders

New report highlights

 

“Corporate IT departments typically prefer to migrate PC operating systems (OSs) via hardware attrition, which means bringing in the new OS as they replace hardware through a normal refresh cycle... With most migrations not starting until the fourth quarter of 2010 at the earliest, and PC hardware replacement cycles typically running at four to five years, most organizations will not be able to migrate to Windows 7 through usual planned hardware refresh before support for Windows XP ends.”

 


Faced with this need to accelerate migration in 2011 and 2012, organizations have three options:

Accelerate PC Replacement Plans
...Assuming a 10,000 PC environment, where all PCs are replaced, Gartner estimates that the migration cost per PC will be between $1,205 and $1,999, depending on how well-managed the environment is...

 

 

Upgrade Installed PCs

Using existing PCs will reduce the capital costs of migration, but will not reduce the labor costs of migration . Assuming the same setup as above — a 10,000 PC environment, where all PCs are upgraded — the migration cost per PC will be between $1,274 and $2,069, depending on how well-managed the PC environment is. This assumes that 25 percent of the machines will need a hardware upgrade to run the OS...

 

Evaluate Partial Migration

For task workers, such as data-entry roles (these account for about 15 percent of the population in a typical organization), migrating from a PC to a hosted virtual desktop (HVD) environment is an alternative to PC migration...

 

Full Gartner report “Prepare for Your Windows 7 Migration Crunch"can be purchased on Gartner’s website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1390130.