Is your firm planning to roll out Vista? If so, all eyes are on you.
The current launch of Microsoft's flashy new operating system, Windows Vista, along with Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007, marks the first simultaneous release of the software giant's flagship products since the joint debut of Windows 95 and Office 95 over a decade ago.
Microsoft's top executives are dashing around the planet delivering slick demonstrations to appreciative audiences, while many in the blogosphere are eager to poke holes in Vista and generally rain on its parade. Over the din of supporters and naysayers, CIOs of financial firms must decide whether or not to roll out the new operating system to desktops across their enterprises.
Luke Flemmer, managing director of consultancy Lab49, says there is very little uptake among financial firms at this time. Upgrading an entire enterprise's desktop operating system is "a very daunting process," he says. Firms will definitely need to refresh their hardware to get the most out of Vista. Dealing with a hardware upgrade and large-scale compatibility testing while coping with the support and operational costs of an OS upgrade are major challenges. "It is hard to see the business case at the moment," he says. Investment firms generally do not rush to take on upgrades of this magnitude and some banks are still running Windows 2000 on some machines, he says.
If firms do upgrade, it will happen bit by bit, says Richard Edwards, a consultant at the Butler Group. They will probably start out using the new version of SharePoint Server, and then realize they can get greater business value if they use it in conjunction with Office 2007. Subsequently, he says, firms will see the value in upgrading to Vista to get the full functionality. Mainstream support for Windows XP will continue until 2009, so firms can afford to wait and see, and investigate the benefits of Vista.
At this early stage, few firms are willing to discuss their migration plans. Fidelity Investments has developed a "gadget" tool for Vista's new sidebar that provides private investors with desktop access to stock market information on Fidelity's Web site, but officials decline to comment on migration plans within the firm.
Officials at one well-known investment bank say that they will adopt a wait-and-see approach before migrating to Vista, and a number of other large banks and exchanges decline to comment.
One early adopter that has gone public with its Vista rollout is the recently re-branded Citi. At the Manhattan Vista launch for IT decision-makers and developers earlier this year, Jagdish Rao, Citi's IT director, said the bank plans to start a phased migration in June. Citi has 350,000 desktops spread over 100 countries. According to Rao, the banking group's IT staff of over 30,000 people has been involved in testing for a large-scale rollout over the past year.
Louise Westerlind, a senior analyst for Celent, says that most firms will probably adopt a wait-and-see approach in the short-term. Larger banks may upgrade one department at a time as a way of hedging the risk, but smaller firms will take their time, she says. "Hedge funds may throw themselves out there a bit more," she says. "They have a reputation for being more innovative, but even then, it will not happen tomorrow. This is a long-term decision."
What's New?
The first thing people say when you ask them what they think of Vista is that it looks really cool. This is thanks to the new graphical user interface, dubbed Aero, which stands for authentic, energetic, reflective and open. While the new GUI represents a great leap forward for Microsoft in terms of graphics and multimedia capabilities, this is hardly a CIO's top priority.
Vista and Office 2007 are designed to be more intuitive to use than previous releases. According to Microsoft officials, a key issue that became apparent from talks with users is that they don't know how to get the most out of the existing capabilities. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says that one function within Excel was so well hidden in previous versions that even Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates did not know it was there. Ballmer says that he praised developers on the new feature they had added, but was surprised to learn it had actually been there for the past three releases of Excel. Ballmer says the new release aims to reduce the trial-and-error element involved with working with Office products.
Microsoft is touting an "unprecedented collaboration" with users in the development and testing phases of Vista and Office 2007. "Excel 2007 was designed very much with the financial services industry in mind," says James Burns, Microsoft's CTO for financial services in the UK. "We found they were often using Excel outside of the area for which it was designed."
Previously, many organizations experienced a limitation in the size of Excel, says Burns. Where there were once 64,000 rows and 255 columns, there are now 1 million rows and 16,000 columns, which means computing power is the limiting factor, he says. Most computers don't have enough RAM to fill an entire Excel spreadsheet.
Excel 2007 contains multiple threads, which Burns says will dramatically speed up calculation times. "Excel risk calculations can take tens of hours if you have to wait for a response from external systems before continuing calculations," he says. The new Excel can run several calculations alongside one another, and as most new hardware has quad core processing, this can speed up the calculations dramatically.
One of the most significant changes for Microsoft users will be the new release of SharePoint Server, says Ralph Baxter, director of London-based spreadsheet management software provider, ClusterSeven. "The rest of the sector is in turmoil as they realize MS SharePoint will become the dominant player for content management and document repository," he says. The industry is seeing a lot of consolidation in anticipation of this, he says, referring to IBM's and Opentext's recent acquisitions of FileNet and Hummingbird, respectively.
Excel Services on the SharePoint Server will allow employees to collaborate on Web-based spreadsheets rather than having to send enormous files via e-mail. It will also allow users to share sections of a particular spreadsheet with others, providing much-needed security for sensitive information.
Security Fears
According to statistics from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), one in 10 laptops is stolen within 12 months of purchase. Laptops stolen from American International Group and ING US Financial Services last year contained the personal and financial information of hundreds of thousands of clients. According to press reports, the data was neither encrypted nor password protected. The Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Vista will include new BitLocker technology to encrypt hard drives and protect sensitive information in the event of computer theft.
Another new security feature is the network access protection (NAP) policy framework, which demands that external laptops meet certain minimum security requirements before connecting to a company's network. "This might also be retrofitted into Windows XP," says Edwards.
Other Vista features that will be made available for XP users include three strategic developer technologies: Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Presentation Foundation.
As a certified Microsoft partner, Flemmer has been using Vista for several months. "It is a very nice operating system," he says. "But it is hard to see a compelling business case for major corporations at present."