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At Dell’s annual meeting with financial analysts yesterday, CEO Michael Dell said there was signs of business migrating to new hardware.
The claim follows protracted concern that business was staying put on legacy systems due to the impact of the financial crisis and the hurdle of large upgrades necessary to run the new generation of Microsoft software, particularly the former Windows Vista which failed to make an impact.
Michael Dell warned analysts that while the signs were encouraging it may take up to two years for enterprise to move completely away from Windows XP and Windows Vista systems.
“If you’re talking about a client refresh, these companies are not likely to replace all their PCs next week or even next quarter,” said Dell. “It requires a whole deployment plans and that is typically a two-year process.”
Dell offered analysts evidence that the economy continues to improve and that both small business and large enterprise are beginning to re-invest in their technology infrastructure. Dell sees the corporate client business and emerging areas such as IT services as being important to the company’s plans.
Dell went on to say that he had been in talks with large companies looking to move away from XP but that they still required a detailed migration plan and were typically cautious in the move to Windows 7. However the response to Windows 7 has been largely positive. It’s likely that Windows 7 Service Pack 1, due later this year, will form an important milestone as many firms feel the first major service pack is the stable time to move to a new Microsoft platform.
“I think the percentage base of commercially installed Windows 7 and Office 2010 is still a small percent,” said Dell of the prospective market in system upgrades. “This is not a one quarter or two quarter event but it does give us a lot of confidence.”
