Today we held a briefing with Gartner on the current state of the Windows 7 migration market. It’s apparent from our discussions, that as a result of our involvement with the product (effectively from its inception) we have managed to turn our early experiences into a proposition that targets all of the challenges associated with the full lifecycle of a project with successful references across a broad span of  industry segments.

A lot of our discussion focussed around the time needed to fully address the scope of such a migration exercise in Enterprise customers. Gartner’s view was that customers should have started planning 2 years ago!, however we see the reality that many customers are only just starting to address the problem of XP going end of life on 8^th April 2014. Whilst this may seem quite a long way away, it is in fact only just over 700 days away and less than 500 working days (498 to be precise at the time of writing) – not very long for what can be a technical and logistically challenging project on an Enterprise scale.

If you’re interested on keeping an eye on the timeline, we’ve built a countdown timer that you can find here.

The good news is that we have be building capacity in line with our client’s current demand, but we do agree with Gartner that many organisations are leaving it late to address the problem, (particularly if they want to exploit the new functionality that such a platform change can provide  i.e. virtualisation, enhanced automation, application rationalisation, support improvements etc.). With only a finite amount of time and resource to meet an immovable date, we were speculating on whether we’re approaching a ‘Y2K’ like bow wave of demand when organisations scramble to react and we see demand outstretch supply.

Are you well on the way to addressing the challenge or can you XPect delays?