When it comes to operating systems, should it be out with the old and in with the new? Fujitsu's CTO, Marc Silvester, offers his advice.

New name, old face

Compared to XP, Vista is quite a different operating system, in terms of look and feel as well as architecture. But for the general business user, Vista didn't offer a great leap forward in business terms or productivity. From what I've seen of the testing phase, Windows 7 will be a great improvement on Vista, and I think customers considering Vista at the moment would be wise to wait for Windows 7. Despite the new name, most people will recognise it as an upgrade of Vista. I don't think that's a bad thing, as many corporate users won't take operating systems until the upgrade releases come out due to set-up risks and bugs in the original.

You tend to find that CIOs sit in two camps those who want to take on new technologies and take a risk and those that want to follow later.  But if you're a risk-taker and thinking about moving to a new operating system, you also have to consider cloud computing. Both software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service are becoming more available and better understood to organisations. If a big company can't afford to modify all its desktops, making changes in a data centre is bound to cost less.

An open window

If you're more risk-averse, I'm not sure you can justify the move. XP is a pretty stable platform and there must be a reasonably big business case to make the move. We're not currently seeing those quantifiable strategies emerge.

Even if companies have a strong business case, while we're in a recession and the ability to invest is less, there will be another type of upgrade emerging one that is business outcome-specific and part of a plan for the start of a gradual upgrade on a project-by-project basis.

To sum up, I think people who are on XP and running their companies successfully should question whether there is a business case to upgrade at the moment. It's true that security is becoming more complex while vulnerabilities are becoming more sophisticated, so if that's your priority, Vista or Windows 7 may be best, as they are more secure. But if I was a customer operating well on XP and I wasn't expecting a business model change or an application set to change, I'd probably stay with it.