Cost of Vista Business License Offset by Savings, Says Microsoft

For a great many large businesses, "the move to the next Windows" has been an ongoing, daily affair for at least well over a decade. And up until recently, the reasons why this migration tends to proceed so slowly have been, to Microsoft, a complete mystery.

If the company can just get Vista pushed out to the corporate desktop, its foot will be in the door just enough, it believes, to make enough of a clearance to push through its more profitable business services: SharePoint, BizTalk, Office Communications, Exchange, audio and video.

Windows is not so much the primary driver for the company as it is the portal - or, in the new "ecosystem" of operating systems, one portal - for the delivery of its services. It's still the entry point of its business model, but the company's goal now is to move corporate clients towards that entry point, in order that the rest of its plan can become feasible.

So as we learned at TechEd last week, Microsoft's adjusted plan is this: It has revised its Business Desktop Deployment packages (BDD) - its key business migration tool - scaling it down from two programs to just one, as part of its "Solution Accelerator" kit (whose name alone screams to migrating companies, "Get on with it!"). But one of the key elements of this program will be management tools for the development of so-called "best practices" - a cloudy phrase which refers collectively to Microsoft's recommendations for deploying services, when applied to the specifics of a large-scale deployment.

These tools will cooperate with Windows XP desktop deployments to the extent that they can still do so - for instance, in the area of creating new group policies that could aid businesses in creating new user restrictions, in preparation for the move to User Account Control.

"BDD allows Windows administrators to have a consistent experience managing both operating systems at the same time," she said. So rather than force companies to adopt a kind of "pilot zone" where some groups are migrated first, and the border between the old and new worlds slowly shifts like a portal to the Twilight Zone, "we try to help them have a unified infrastructure."

But those tools may help drive home the point that life for administrators and users alike will be simpler with Vista deployed on the desktop. As group product manager Stella Chernyak told BetaNews, "What we see BDD for Vista can help with dramatically is helping companies to move to that better-managed space, to optimize their infrastructure and adopt these best practices. User Account Control, group policy, diagnostics, security, adopting best practices [is easier under Vista]. You can do it under Windows XP, but with Windows XP, it is very difficult to do."

What may be BDD's most important feature in the long run, however, is its so-called Deployment Workbench. Vista and the forthcoming Windows Server 2003 (by way of Systems Management Server) are changing the dynamics of OS deployment with their implementation of Windows Image Manager. While that just sounded like the first sentence of a press release, the differences are similar to what befell the construction industry with the onset of prefabrication.

Essentially, you can deploy a Vista image remotely as though you were transferring one big file instead of tens of thousands of little ones. That fact alone makes the deployment of, say, 10,000 desktops in one migration suddenly seem bearable.

What about users' key applications? Admins can upgrade them on one machine, create a WIM image based on those upgrades, and transfer them along with the OS image. But what about the users' personal settings? The deployment scheme will know to integrate them into the deployment, so customizations are rolled in (for Microsoft-brand software, at least).

As a result, Chernyak told us, the issue of deployment costs during the migration process (measured in human-hours of administration) almost disappears. At that point, businesses can focus on the subsequent costs of retraining, adjusting to the new environment, and administering all those new services.

While there are costs involved there, Chernyak's case is that they're more than offset by the implementation of best practices, which is the de facto first stage of the migration process under the BDD scheme. Chernyak likens the change of environment from XP to Vista as a change in diet - as adopting a new regimen that compels people to work better.

"What I tell customers is, if you eat right food, you lose weight without an effort," she told us. "Windows Vista lets you eat the right food, so you don't have to weigh as much, and use so much effort to use best practices."

In a study Microsoft conducted with Gartner Group, the companies estimate businesses will save between $300 and $700 per year, per computer, after having deployed Vista. As Microsoft's Mike Burk told us, the results of the study came from a selection from a group of 500 large-scale customers already participating in another study, to which Microsoft asked questions about their plans to implement new tools such as expanded group policies and User Account Control.

Vista Business licenses typically start at about $450 on average, with prices descending according to number of seats purchased.

Chernyak advances the following theory: Many of the administrative troubles that cropped up during the XP era were on account of the fact that users were given administrator privileges, if only to continue to be able to do simple management tasks on their own systems like set the time and change their desktop backgrounds. Admins would have set up users with lesser privileges if they could reasonably have afforded to do so, but the headaches associated with users' complaints over their restricted abilities often outweighed any security benefits.

User Account Control, she says, eliminates those headaches by enabling admins to enroll users into Active Directory with limited privileges by default, though with the ability to elevate those privileges to do reasonably permissible tasks, in such a way that's auditable by admins. That reduces, if not eliminates, the headaches caused by having everyone be admins or having everyone be "lesser-than's."

When I wrote about the migration process from Windows NT and 2000 to Windows Server 2003 several years ago, the issues I discussed relative to that time and the issues that are relevant to the Vista/Windows Server 2008 migration today are as fundamentally different, I told Chernyak, as migrating from city to city via covered wagon in the 1800s, versus using a high-speed train today.

"I love this analogy!" she exclaimed. But even if a company doesn't understand that comparison, she continued, the complexities surrounding the differing contexts from 2001 to now have likely transported it to a new standpoint. To that end, the tools Microsoft provides companies to evaluate and prepare for the move are much more sophisticated now.

"Companies need to move faster. The world changed between now and six years ago," she added, as evidenced by the broadening bandwidth required for businesspeople just to connect with one another.

Getting those companies to move faster, for Microsoft, means appealing directly to the individuals who are most receptive and sensitive to changes in the feature set, and compelling them to push the accelerator pedal.

Executives, for instance, tend to be the customers who use Vista first, perhaps in their homes. These people, said Chernyak, are typically "highly trained professionals who want the latest and greatest, and they're also the people who make all the money [decisions] for that company. What we hear from them is...they actually have to push back until they have [prepared their workforce for Vista], because they can't move as fast as they would want to go. So I hear what you're saying, yet IT is saying something different. They want the latest graphics, the latest experience, they can enjoy all the great video. We still need to make sure all the applications they have in their environment work on these new systems, so these users can move."