Microsoft Corp. is in the middle of a major marketing campaign designed to drum up interest in its biggest operating system upgrade in six years. Windows Vista, the client side of the company's yet-to-be-named, next-generation server, code-named "Longhorn," is set for delivery to corporate customers at the end of the year. Longhorn and the redesigned 2007 Office system application suite will follow next year.
Despite Vista's ties to the desktop, the OS and its associated applications are poised to take a position as an enterprise infrastructure technology rather than a personal productivity tool. Witness Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who talks up the 64-bit technology's collaborative workflow capabilities, retooled security design, rich search functionality, and eye-popping 3D graphics.
"Taking advantage of chip improvements allows us to be more ambitious with what the software can do," Gates said during his keynote speech at the Microsoft Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2006 in May. During the event he expounded on the importance in a digitized economy of the PC and all of its applications. "As the world globalizes, the tool that allows work to be done anywhere is this software ecosystem running on the PC." He went on to say that the key themes of the next-generation OS and Office system are: simplifying how people work together, communicating, and being able to find things through a rich search capability.
It's all very impressive on paper, and even in a live demonstration. But there were some dazed and confused faces in the crowd during a Vista presentation by Microsoft at a recent GE Fanuc Automation meeting in Florida.
"People are still trying to decide what it is," says Brian Heble, a systems integration consultant in Lakewood, CO. "And until they do, they don't plan to budge."
While Vista and Longhorn have been discussed in IT circles for over a year, the ambiguity of a drastically different operating environment -- not to mention Microsoft's track record of missed ship dates -- has enabled many to avoid the "upgrade" discussion. However, the beta 2 version of Windows Vista and the test versions of Longhorn and Office 2007 are now available. So, it's decision time. But when to switch? And, more importantly: How?
Many manufacturers have spent the last five years moving from costly proprietary systems to the promised land of Windows, a lower-cost and easier-to-maintain commercial off-the-shelf technology. Many have followed the lead of their automation vendors, which have reengineered proprietary plant management and control applications around Microsoft's .NET framework, introduced in 2000. Service-oriented architectures, .NET, and XML are some of the essential underpinnings for connectivity between the plant and the enterprise. And Windows, with its ubiquitous user interface (UI), has become the common denominator among disparate IT and production groups.
With the introduction of Windows on the plant floor, however, came questions about stability and security. Manufacturers have always cringed at the thought of a Windows crash or an Internet Explorer security breach. Plus, the need to upgrade desktops every 12 months with Windows XP service packs has been a big cause for concern among large, global companies with thousands of desktops to maintain. Vista ups the ante even more. Moving to a new OS dwarfs the scale of installing a security patch. Indeed, it's the difference between an upgrade and a migration strategy, which is what Vista will require.
Migration Path
Windows Vista Business and Windows Vista Enterprise -- the two corporate editions -- replace Windows XP Professional. Each can be installed on either 32-bit or 64-bit processor systems, but they are very different from their XP predecessor. A new UI, called Windows Aero, delivers a transparent glass design that supports animations and Windows Flip and Windows Flip 3D navigation, which makes it appear that a page is being turned. New navigation, search, and workflow features that tap into SharePoint collaboration tools can organize files and search the entire operating system.
In addition, the Enterprise edition adds a feature called Windows BitLocker, a hardware-based encryption technology. Also included are a Unix-based subsystem that allows Unix applications to run unchanged on a Windows-based PC, and Virtual PC Express, a feature that lets legacy applications run unchanged in a virtual environment on top of Vista.
Capabilities like BitLocker will reduce the number of critical security vulnerabilities by as much as 80%, according to a Yankee Group report, which is perhaps all the information a manufacturer needs to make the decision to move to Vista. But the move also requires upgrades to hardware, applications testing for compatibility, and changes in behavior.
For the most part, manufacturers are a cautious bunch when it comes to new technology. "We've been successful, but our philosophy is not to be on the bleeding edge," says Rick Blanchard, CIO of Genlyte Group Inc., a lighting conglomerate headquartered in Louisville, KY. "We've learned our lesson there... We have a lot of scars from a failed Oracle implementation and that's why we are risk-averse." Consequently, Blanchard says, "we won't be forced by Microsoft to upgrade to Vista. We'll sit back and let the market sort itself out."
Microsoft, recognizing that there will be customer apprehension and outright resistance, is taking a two-step approach to the Vista rollout. The first discussions have centered around software partners, whom Microsoft hopes can temper customer opposition.
To that end, it's up to software companies that have been working with Microsoft for the last two years on Vista and Longhorn development to take the brunt of the migration burden. Enterprise and plant-floor software vendors alike have been getting current applications Vista-certified and performing pilot projects. "It is an expensive, time-consuming process that our customers expect us to do," says Chris Lenzo, director of product strategy for North America at Exact Software North America.
Yet, it's necessary, Lenzo says, because in order to maintain customers' trust and loyalty, software companies need to insulate their customers from having to do the work themselves. But with Exact's 13 enterprise applications and millions of lines of code, the company has had its hands full. "As excited as we are about Vista's stronger security and new user interfaces, it has us crawling all over our application code to make sure nothing is left from a legacy perspective that could jump up and bite us later," he says.
Similarly, Invensys has been deep in development to ensure that its ArchestrA technology infrastructure and Wonderware software -- such as InTouch, its HMI application -- can take advantage of the vector graphics in the new OS. The prototype Invensys built will allow an end user to mouse over a pressure transmitter, for example, and magnify that part to scale while maintaining high-density information on the screen.
Key Features
While the 64-bit architecture provides the processing muscle, vector graphics are what could really change the view of the plant. This is one area that Don Richardson, Microsoft's director of manufacturing industry solutions, often explains to end users who are grappling with how Vista will apply to real-world applications.
Today's Windows-based HMI applications are visually flat and screens must be changed in order to dive down and look at a particular controller, for instance. But imagine looking at a graphical representation of the entire plant floor. "With scalable vector graphics you can zoom in and maintain the definition and resolution," Richardson says.
The real power, he says, comes once all of the data models are in place to provide context around the information. Vista has a development platform called WinFX that includes things such as: Presentation Foundation (code-named Avalon), for blending UIs, documents, and media content; Workflow Foundation, a programming engine and tools for building collaborative applications; and Communication Foundation (code-named Indigo) for connectivity via Web services.
Collaboration, while an overused term, Richardson admits, is the key element of Vista and Office 2007. It moves companies closer to the concept of "one version of the truth."
"For example, right now you could e-mail a spreadsheet to people or post it somewhere on a portal, but the problem is that two people can't access and edit it at the same time," says Dennis Cocco, chief product strategist at Activplant Corp. (London, ON), a Microsoft ISV. But if that spreadsheet can be posted on one server site, with one master copy that everyone works with, "there is always one single version of that report," Cocco says.
Those collaborative benefits even extend to the plant floor. "By pivoting the data in different ways it can serve different roles in the company," Richardson says. "This is compelling at both an IT level as well as for making decisions, because you are getting the right information to the operators, for instance, to empower them."
Chevron Corp., one of the first customers to receive all three beta versions of Vista, Longhorn, and Office 2007, has been standardizing on Windows technology since 1998, when it rolled it out as the standard desktop to its 60,000 employees. Over the years, each new version of Windows has contained new productivity capabilities. "Now we are about to embark on our third wave, with the 2007 set of products, and we are looking forward to the new Vista capabilities and server capabilities to improve the management of the network and the infrastructure," said Alan Nunns, Chevron's general manager of IT and strategy, in a presentation at the WinHEC conference.
Chevron can have 400 terabytes of drilling data online at any given moment, and manages 100,000 design documents and a million e-mails each day. Microsoft's next-generation OS, server, and Office suite could solve one of Chevron's major stumbling blocks. "Our biggest strength is information management -- and our biggest challenge is information management," Nunns said in his presentation.
What's the Catch?
Microsoft and its ISV partners seem to have most of the Vista migration figured out, including all of the backward compatibility issues. According to Microsoft officials, the company will support any of its operating systems for 10 years from its original release date. That should cover companies that don't want to move immediately from XP. In addition, most ISVs say they will not force a move to Vista.
"Even though Microsoft is adding new interfaces and APIs [application programming interfaces], they are not breaking some of the existing APIs," says Mark Davidson, vice president of ArchestrA marketing at Invensys. "The good news is that many existing applications will run on Vista."
But, obviously, in order to take full advantage of Vista capabilities, applications must be programmed with its APIs. The first step for end users is to sit down with their ISVs and ensure that existing applications are certified for Vista, meaning they will run on the new OS, albeit with limited capability. Then ask for a product roadmap that spells out when Vista-compatible versions will roll out.
One concern that could impact existing applications has to do with the new UI. It has visually appealing features, including a new "ribbon," which is the key to the new UI, that combines menus and toolbars into one place for easy location of features and functions. However, in previous versions of Windows, most users were running the OS with administrator-level privileges. Having the full power of an administrator can be a problem if malicious software enters the environment. In order to counter that potential problem, Microsoft has introduced a new feature called User Account Control, a security measure that runs the program with limited end-user privileges.
"The problem with this is that much of the software that has been written assumes that the user is running as an administrator. Therefore, if you try it with less privilege, the software fails," says Michael Cherry, a lead analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent consulting firm in Kirkland, WA. Richardson disputes the claim that the software will cease to function as a result of the new capability.
Even considering such idiosyncrasies, when it comes time to migrate, most manufacturers will find that the hardware, not the software, may be the hindrance.
According to Microsoft, an expected 475 million Vista PCs will ship in the first 24 months of its launch. There's a reason for that. The new OS and Office suite will require a lot of memory and processing power to handle 3D graphics and multithreading capabilities.
Graphics card support is the biggest requirement, Cherry says. "A lot of organizations are using laptops instead of desktops and it's hard to put a new graphics card in a laptop." That would mean purchasing all new hardware, which can be a pricey proposition.
Cherry suggests identifying the features of Vista that are important to the organization, and then considering the hardware requirements. It may be that only some systems will need to be upgraded right away, leaving a mass migration to new hardware for the next budget cycle.
Overall, most of the issues that have surfaced are relatively minor. The good news is that migration to Microsoft's new technology does not need to happen right away, although some say the value-add outweighs the risk, which could entice companies to move quickly.
"Manufacturers tend to be conservative in adopting new technology, but I don't think that with this particular release you'll see as much resistance or hesitation," says Activplant's Cocco. "The reason is that the benefits are so overwhelming. [It addresses] a lot of the current struggles people have with security or collaboration. ... Once they see these new features it will be a no-brainer to jump to the next generation."