According to a July 2009, Forrester Research Inc. report titled “Corporate Desktop Operating System Trends, Q3 2008 – Q2 2009”, 86 percent of corporate customers through March 2009 were still running Microsoft Windows XP.

As with any major software transition, many customers are concerned about data migration, hardware limitations, compatibility and integration of existing applications and licensing issues associated with upgrading to Windows 7.

Dell and Microsoft are tightly integrated and continue to work together throughout the development and testing of Windows 7. As a result, Dell services are tuned to address specific IT pain points of OS transitions. Dell is helping early adopters transition efficiently and cost-effectively to beta versions of Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2.

Dell provides customers a unique set of services for assessment, design and deployment which can reduce the time and risk of migration by utilizing proven reference architecture with field tested operational models. Dell can help customers understand the business potential of transitioning to Windows 7 and/or Server 2008 R2. Upcoming offerings that can help optimize and manage customers’ infrastructure, include:

· Application Management Services: Application compatibility is a key concern for many customers. Dell has developed a suite of services to efficiently identify, test, remediate and deploy applications. Dell can also help customers inventory and rationalize their application portfolio before initiating the remediation activities to focus resources on the most critical applications.

· Migration and Deployment Services: In order to ease upgrading to Windows 7, Dell offers readiness assessments and optimized OS deployment services. Dell’s optimized deployment services help customers with all migration aspects including organization, infrastructure, hardware, software, image and deployment. By leveraging Dell’s global deployment capabilities and tools, customers can more efficiently upgrade to Windows 7, while decreasing deployment time, mitigating risk, and reducing network traffic.

· Image Management Services: These provide fully functional images built by Dell consultants according to the customers’ specifications that are ready for deployment of Windows 7 on Dell client systems.