86 Percent of IT Leaders Plan to Deploy Windows 7 in Next 18 Months

TEMPE, AZ (Gawkwire.com) Ensynch, Inc., the Southwest’s leading provider of IT consulting and staffing services, today announced the results of a survey of business and IT executives in Arizona and Southern California, indicating a boost in spending on technology in next 18 months, with heated interest in upgrading to Windows 7. Based on surveys completed by 152 IT and business executives in September and October 2009, results indicate 86 percent of respondents plan on deploying Windows 7 within the next 18 months.

The research was conducted at a series of customer events across the Southwest hosted by Ensynch and partners – Microsoft, Quest Software, and Softchoice, where hundreds of executives expressed astounding interest in deploying the next generation of desktop and virtualization technologies, based on the capabilities of Microsoft’s new Windows 7 Operating System (launching publicly this week).

“These results reinforce the idea that there is tremendous pent-up market demand based on companies that skipped deploying Windows Vista and stayed on Windows XP,” said Ensynch CEO Gene Holmquist. “People who talk about having to upgrade to Windows 7 because support of XP will end are missing the point of the game-changing business value provided by Windows 7 and related technologies.” The Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg echoed this idea, saying, “An 8-year old operating system is the equivalent of a 20-year old car.”

The tech industry has also connected the dots as to the business implications of Windows 7. CRN Magazine’s Windows 7 Test Center Review (Sep. 2009) elaborated, “Windows 7 is an integral part of an enhanced Windows ecosystem; major improvements and new features in Server 2008 R2, Exchange 2010 and Office 2010 are all designed to take advantage of the feature set in Windows 7…including the powerful extension of the virtualization platform Microsoft engineered with Hyper-V on Server 2008 R2.”

The magnitude of change from market adoption of these solutions will have a quantifiable positive impact for technology vendors, solution providers, and the economy. A recent IDC study cited that for every dollar of revenue Microsoft gets for U.S. sales of Windows 7 until the end of 2010, partners will reap $18.51 dollars in related products and services revenue. The study also predicted in the same timeframe 2 million IT jobs will be related to Windows 7. When you combine these factors with the scale of businesses that will deploy Windows 7, it stands to be a significant contributor to the economic turnaround.

New desktop technologies built around Windows 7 are part of what many are calling the next-generation optimized desktop. “We see the outcome of this pent-up tsunami of technology being as big of a paradigm shift as going from landline home phones to mobile phones,” said Holmquist. “It’s going to be hard for us to meet the demand once customers realize what’s in front of them. We already have a waiting list of customers interested in our Next Generation Desktop Assessments, and we couldn’t be more excited.”