As you already know, on August 7th we made Windows 7 RTM available to our Volume License (VL) customers who have Software Assurance (SA). Windows Server customers are able to download 2008 R2 as of August 14th and on September 1st, we announced VL customers without SA are able to purchase Windows 7 through Volume Licensing. With this broad availability to our business customers, I want to share TCO (“total cost of ownership”) data from early adopters, some feedback from enterprise customers, and advanced companion tools and applications to enable the best experience as businesses deploy Windows 7. We have a lot going on, so read on for all the details.

To support early migration to Windows 7, today we announced on the MDOP Team Blog that we will be releasing Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2009 R2 in late October 2009, which I’ll also talk more about in a bit.

Deployments are happening right now and your company can begin deployment as well! Several of our early adopters are already having great success with Windows 7. I thought I would share some of the TCO findings from studies of three enterprise customer deployments. Customers involved in the studies were:

• Baker Tilly (Professional Services - UK): 2,200 users
• City of Miami (Local Government - US): 2,235 users
• Getronics (IT Services - Netherlands): 14,300 users

Some of the key TCO findings from the studies include:

• Direct cost savings of IT labor dedicated to PC management are expected to be in the range of $89-160 per PC annually. That means IT Pros are saving up to two hours per desktop annually. For companies with several thousand PCs, this frees up a lot of valuable time, allowing IT departments to focus on more mission critical efforts and support their business more efficiently.
• Overall, the $70-$160 in savings per PC annually represents reduction of IT labor costs ranging from a 10-20%. For example, Baker Tilly has been able to re-focus their IT force on strategic projects and estimates they’ll save 18% on PC management costs.
• Companies are realizing power savings with Windows 7 that add to the direct savings in IT Labor. For example, the City of Miami estimates their expected power savings alone ($54 per PC per year) justifies their Windows 7 deployment.
• City of Miami also expects to save big on service desk costs. Previously, the city IT staff had to physically travel to the PC user’s location to resolve support issues. Windows 7 has advanced capabilities such as Remote Desktop, which now help the IT staff to diagnose and resolve issues remotely, saving both travel time and end-user downtime. Built-in features like the Problem Steps Recorder (PSR) have been described as a “nugget of gold in the operating system.” Specifically, PSR helps users communicate problems to the service desk, reducing the need to dispatch technicians to user locations by as much as 90%.

These TCO studies represent a few of our Windows 7 customers. You can find out more by reading the full TCO studies. Here is what other early deploying customers are saying about savings and overall value:

Gokboru Kilic, Client Systems Professional, Turkcell:

We expect support costs to drop by 20 percent with Windows 7.

Andreas Viehauser, Head of Client and Software Management, Raiffeisen Informatik:

We are able to deploy to different computer devices using the same image file—helping reduce deployment time by 60 percent. What used to take three and a half hours now takes as little as one hour.

Miguel Lopez, Project Manager, F. Hoffman LaRoche:

With Group Policies and Windows 7, we’ll have more granular control over our computers and can more easily enforce how we govern our IT environment.

Henk Siereveld, Global IT Director, Bugaboo:

Our users love Windows 7. It provides an easier way of working, the interface is attractive, and it offers more functionality than our prior operating systems.

Mark McBeth, Vice President of IT, Starwood Hotels & Resorts:

From an IT perspective, we’ve received positive feedback on the performance and stability. For us, those are the very first things we look for in an OS for Sheraton.

John McConeghey, IT Manager, Pella

We opted to roll out Windows Server 2008 R2 in tandem with Windows 7 because there are synergies that we gain by deploying the two products together.

Similarly, customers who have deployed App-V from MDOP are also seeing significant savings. Our recent App-V Cost Reduction Study shows Microsoft App-V is THE desktop virtualization product that delivers immediate savings on the desktop. App-V is estimated to provide an annual savings of $156 in hard costs and $125 in user productivity, yielding a total savings of up to $280 per PC annually. 

We are happy to see so much excitement from early Windows 7 adopters, showing the real value Windows 7 provides enterprises. We recently asked Forrester to take a closer look at a broad set of enterprise customers to understand the real challenges of enterprises today and what is most important to them. Forrester surveyed over 318 senior IT decision makers and C- level IT executives in the US, Germany and Japan, with 78% of the respondent companies having over 500 PCs.

Key findings from their survey include:

• For 87% of companies, controlling costs is a critically or very important business priority.
• For 84% of companies, improving employee productivity is a critically or very important business priority.
• For 54% of companies, improving employee mobility is a critically or very important business priority.
• For 86% of companies, security is a critically or very important technology initiative.

As such - mobility, employee productivity and security requirements are surfacing as central challenges to the customer’s experience:

These companies support on average 174 Branch offices each; with only 38% of employees on average working in HQ; with 20% of the branch office workers dissatisfied with their access to corporate data.

• 68% of the companies struggle with the inability to manage PCs when those are not physically connected to the corporate network.
• 10% of the helpdesk calls are VPN-related.
• 23% of the helpdesk calls being related to users needing to install applications to do work and 14% of helpdesk calls are caused by users corrupting their systems by installing unauthorized software – overall an industry concern over malware management.

The study confirmed the real challenges of enterprises today which increase companies’ costs each year. With Windows 7 and MDOP, we developed Windows Optimized Desktop to target challenges to help address the customer’s most critical needs. It’s important to note that customers who deploy Windows 7 and MDOP with their existing server infrastructure will be able to expect significant value, user productivity, stronger data protection, and security and PC management. They can also expect automation improvements that can help them save costs and improve efficiency. The great news for customers here is that they do not have big dependencies on other deployment initiatives before they can realize the benefits of their Windows 7 deployment. However, if customers choose to deploy Windows Server 2008 R2 with Windows 7, they can expect even greater cost savings, reduced complexity and increased user productivity.

We also continue to innovate on MDOP to ensure it serves as a valuable enabler to the deployment and management of Windows 7. As I already mentioned, we’ll be releasing MDOP 2009 R2 in late October. MDOP 2009 R2 will add Windows 7 support for all of the tools except MED-V, which will support Windows 7 in the first quarter of calendar year 2010 via MED-V 1.0 SP1. I recommend reading the MDOP Team Blog for more information on MDOP 2009 R2.

Furthering our efforts help companies deploy Windows 7, we recently announced the availability of the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010. MDT 2010 is optimized to support Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 deployments, and has built-in capabilities to support customers migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7.

With the release of both MDOP 2009 R2 and MDT 2010, and other resources available on the TechNet and Springboard websites, customers can feel confident about the deployment support available for Window 7.

Now is the time to begin testing and deploying Windows 7 with MDOP and Windows Server 2008 R2!

Today we are announcing the availability of Microsoft’s updated Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack – MDOP 2009. MDOP 2009 includes updates to Microsoft Application Virtualization and Asset Inventory Services, as well as the first included release of Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization.  Additionally, MDOP 2009 still includes Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset, Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management, and Microsoft System Center Desktop Error Monitoring.

For more information on MDOP 2009, check out this blog post on the MDOP blog.

There’s been a lot of talk in the community about what Windows 7 offers consumers. Today, I’d like to highlight the enterprise value of the product and how it reflects what customers and partners told us enterprises need most.

With Windows Vista, we learned a lot about how involved our customers and partners like to be in the development of an OS – in a nutshell, early and often. With Windows 7, we changed the way we developed the Windows OS in order to be more responsive to that feedback. As such, early on we identified three main principles to our new process:

• Planning: Our team spent six months on planning Windows 7 in a “vision phase.” We analyzed trends and customer needs before building features. We also focused more on end-to-end business scenarios, rather than solely on features and technologies.
• Predictability: We committed to giving our customers and partners a timeframe for our release and stuck to it. We remain on track to ship Windows 7 within three years of the Windows Vista release. We also only shared information about Windows 7 when we had a higher degree of certainty which has resulted in minimal changes from earlier disclosures.
• Early Ecosystem Engagement: We engaged with partners during the early stages of Windows 7 development, rather than waiting for the traditional beta timeframe. This has allowed for a more seamless experience and greater compatibility in all areas.

There are three key areas we look at in our development process: industry trends, in-depth discussions with top customers and partners, and extensive quantitative customer research.

I won’t go into details except to remind you of trends with the most significant impact on IT today: costs, consumerization, reducing carbon footprint, contingency planning and compliance. As a result of the continued economic deterioration, most businesses are thinking about cost. IT is under pressure to deliver efficiencies in their environments and greater ROI on technology expenses – we recognize this through personal experience and input from our customers and partners.

We spent a great deal of time talking and engaging with our customers and partners in order to really understand what’s on their mind. Knowing where their challenges lie and what tools they need to be successful helps us deliver an OS that meets their needs and is a valuable investment, which is critical when IT budgets are tighter than ever.

This engagement came in two forms – qualitative and quantitative.

Our qualitative outreach consisted of over 100 of our top customers through five programmatic engagement vehicles:

• Desktop Advisory Council: Twenty-seven active IT leaders across a variety of industries including some of the world’s largest manufacturers, banks, insurers, telecoms, energy companies and professional services firms. We used their input for overall direction and feature decisions.
• OEM Engagement: Leading manufacturers from around the world. This gave us an opportunity to inform and set direction, while receiving their feedback.
• Ecosystem Engagement: Members of the Windows Ecosystem Readiness Program received access to builds and toolkits for Windows 7. They also gained access to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 labs for partners.
• Technology Adoption Program: Strictly engineering-focused, customers in TAP committed a large investment of their time and resources in test deployments of Beta and pre-Beta code. Their help enables us to validate features in real-world situations, produce bugs and generate feedback.
• First Wave Program: Customers who are already in progress with deploying Windows 7 Beta in their environment. This group provides real time feedback on their experience deploying Windows 7 Beta and helps us see what an enterprise deployment looks like.

For our Quantitative Research, we engaged extensively with almost 4000 customers in developing and emerging markets. This research surfaced the top areas of concern: Risk Management, Compliance and Mobility. Key findings included:

• 56% said they needed help protecting corporate data on laptops. This validated our decision to include BitLocker in Windows 7 Enterprise, and to extend its capabilities to the portable hard drives that can be just as dangerous and more loosely monitored than laptops.
• 61% expressed a deep concern about ensuring their users install and use only authorized applications (for fear of security breaches from unauthorized applications). This helped prioritize our plan to develop AppLocker.
• 49% wanted to make it easier for remote workers to access corporate resources, bubbling a plan up for Direct Access capabilities.

So how did this affect Windows 7?

Windows 7 Enterprise mirrors what we learned during our planning and research phase and resulted in three big areas of investment:

• Making users Productive Anywhere is a focus on the mobile user community and empowering users with seamless access: We built technologies into Windows 7 such as BranchCache, Direct Access, Federated Search, and Enterprise Search Scopes to enable users to access to their data and applications anywhere and anytime.
• Improving Security and Control is a focus on protecting data, enabling compliance and giving IT better control: With this in mind we designed BitLocker To Go, which protects data stored on portable media, such as USB drives. This enables IT to only allow authorized users to read data or portable media, even if the media is lost or stolen. Additionally, AppLocker provides a mechanism for administrators to specify via Group Policy exactly what is allowed to run on their systems.
• Streamlining PC Management is a continued focus to drive the cost of managing a Windows environment down: Windows 7 makes managing and deploying desktops, laptops and virtual environments much easier. IT Pros can use the same tools and skills they use today with Windows Vista for Windows 7. New scripting and automation capabilities through Windows PowerShell 2.0 help reduce the costs of managing and troubleshooting PCs.

And we’re not finished! Research on Windows 7 overall continues today as we receive feedback from our Beta testers. We’ve received over 500,000 Send Feedback reports on Windows 7 Beta. Thanks to our dedicated customers, we have hundreds of fixes in the pipeline. This is a testament to how we’re taking your feedback and inputting it directly into Windows 7.

With Windows 7, we’ve advanced our vision for an Optimized Desktop to allow administrators the ability to balance flexibility and control in helping end-users work better in their environments. Windows 7 Enterprise, along with Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), delivers Microsoft Windows Optimized Desktop vision to customers: it gives users anytime, anywhere access to information they need to get their work done; while providing tools for IT to support their business securely, protect corporate data, achieve cost efficiencies, and take advantage of the virtualization trends in the client computing arena.

To summarize, customers tell us the economy is bringing new levels of scrutiny to how they manage costs, mitigate risks and make their people more productive with less. We get it. Windows 7 Enterprise is about helping both IT Pros and end users manage an intensifying – and often opposing – confluence of pressures.

Throughout the Windows 7 development process, we’ve been committed to creating an OS that is designed for the way people actually work. We’re convinced Windows 7 has an exciting and powerful offering for our business customers, but we want to hear from you. If you are one of our enterprise customers considering Windows 7, our guidance to you is to start testing and planning now and send us your feedback. If you haven’t been considering Windows 7, we think there are compelling reasons for you to take another look.

Our MDOP customers have told us that they want to see Windows 7 Support for Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) so that they can move ahead with their application testing for enterprise deployments of Windows 7 early on. We heard you loud and clear. Today we are announcing the availability of App-V 4.5 CU1 with support for the Windows 7 Beta.

All subscribers of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) can head on over to Microsoft Connect and register to download the update. This release will have access to the new technology for free as part of their current licenses.

For more information, see this blog post over on the MDOP Blog which also includes roadmap information around App-V 4.6.

MDOP is part of the Windows Optimized Desktop. A few weeks ago, Gavriella Schuster highlighted the value of the Windows Optimized Desktop for businesses and announced specifics for the Windows 7 Enterprise SKU, which is an Optimized Desktop offering. For further guidance of Windows Deployments in your environment, see Gavriella’s blog post on the Windows for your Business Blog here.

Speaking of Virtualization, have you seen Microsoft’s brand new website on Microsoft.com? Check it out.

Hi, I’m Gavriella; welcome to the new Windows for your Business Blog.

Let me introduce myself: I’m a member of the Windows Product Management team and have been at Microsoft for 13 years. For the last two and a half, I’ve been focused on product management for MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack). In my new role as Senior Director, I’m leading Product Management for Windows Client, including the Windows OS, the MDOP products, and the client virtualization strategy for our commercial customers. For us that means all customers from small businesses through large enterprises. My team and I are focused on helping optimize the desktop experience for our business customers - we focus on enabling end-user productivity and reducing desktop administration overhead.

Moving forward, the Windows for Your Business Blog will focus on Windows for our commercial customers, and today I want to specifically talk about what we’re doing to help those customers with their deployments and reducing IT costs.

With the current state of the economy, I understand that many companies are scrutinizing IT budgets and doing some “belt-tightening.” The customers I have spoken to most recently are also looking for technology that will lead to greater efficiency and cost savings to help them shift costs out of the organization, as well as align with business needs. I think customers are recognizing that this economic downturn is not a short term penny-pinching exercise. Instead, we’re all looking for strategies to weather this economic storm. In order to do this, we will need to make fundamental changes that reduce operating margins for the long term.

I also know that the reality of customers’ deployment projects will typically take them 12-18 months of planning and testing before operating system deployments can begin. Application testing and migration readiness typically takes a significant portion of this time. It also takes time for companies to standardize hardware, certify operating system images, select deployment tools and methods, as well as train end-users and IT for the new operating system.

With this demand on time, plus the strains from today’s economy, our customers are under a lot of pressure.

As a first step, we recommend our customers assess their environment to be in a better position to decide what OS they need to deploy:

1. Take an inventory of how many applications you manage in your current enterprise environment – here is guidance that can help.

2. Talk to your application vendors to find out how long they intend to provide support for their application running in Windows XP and when they plan to support their application running in Windows 7.

3. This will help you assess the maximum length of time that you have to move from Windows XP to Windows 7.

• Then you should assess the level of application compatibility that your applications have with Windows 7 (we recommend you test your applications against Windows Vista as there will be a high degree of compatibility between Windows 7 and Windows Vista) – this will help you assess how many of your applications will need to be upgraded, remediated or replaced in order to work in your new operating environment.
• If you test your applications against the Windows 7 Beta, we recommend that for the mainstream OS deployment, you later test applications against the RTM (Release-to-Manufacturing) release.
• Here is guidance and documentation on performing your application compatibility testing: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc507853.aspx.

4. Then you should assess the hardware compatibility in your environment (and what it will be in the 12-18 months that it might take for you to complete the deployment of the new OS).

• Here is guidance and documentation on performing your hardware assessment: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/solutionaccelerators/hardwareassessment/wv/default.mspx.

5. Additionally, here are other useful steps to consider as you are assessing for OS deployment: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749165.aspx.

Having this information about your environment will help you identify any blocking issues that you need to address in your OS migration and what your timelines might look like in reality.

We recommend you use what you are running today to make the right decision for your business.

• If you are running Windows 2000 in your environment: Migrate your Windows 2000 PCs to Windows Vista as soon as possible. Extended support for Windows 2000 ends Q2 2010, and as an commerical customer, you may soon find your business’s critical applications are unsupported.
• If you are in the process of planning or deploying Windows Vista: Continue your Windows Vista SP1 deployment. If you’re really in the early stages or just starting on Windows Vista, plan to test and deploy Windows Vista SP2 (on target to RTM Q2 2009). Moving onto Windows Vista now will allow for an easier transition to Windows 7 in the future due to the high degree of compatibility.
• If you are on Windows XP now and are undecided about which OS to move to: Make sure you taken into consideration the risk of skipping Windows Vista, which I am discussing below. And know that deploying Windows Vista now will make the future transition to Windows 7 easier.
• If you are on Windows XP now and are waiting for Windows 7: Make sure you take into consideration the risks of skipping Windows Vista, and plan on starting an early evaluation of Windows 7 for your company using the beta that’s available now. Testing and remediating applications on Windows Vista will ease your Windows 7 deployment due to the high degree of compatibility.

We know some of our customers are considering waiting for Windows 7 instead of deploying Windows Vista today. We want these customers to understand the following considerations, so they are not surprised later on:

• You may find your company in situations where applications are no longer supported on Windows XP and not yet supported on Windows 7.
• You will want to take time to evaluate Windows 7 just as you evaluate any new operating system for your environment prior to deployment (see deployment realities above). As Windows 7 is planned to be released in about 3 years after Windows Vista, the total period that many customers will likely be waiting prior to deploying Windows 7 in their environment will likely be in the range of 5 years after Windows Vista release.

Regardless of which OS you plan to deploy or are running today, consider deploying the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) which is part of the Windows Optimized Desktop, so that you can implement cost saving best practices. The Windows Optimized Desktop is the combination of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) and the Windows OS (Windows Vista Enterprise or Windows 7 Enterprise). MDOP offers Software Assurance customers advanced tools to provide immediate ROI through software asset management, help desk management, application management and group policy management.

We expect deployment and application migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 to be similar in effort to going from Windows XP to Windows Vista. As I mentioned above, there is a great deal of compatibility between both Windows Vista and Windows 7, as we are not introducing any major architectural changes. Our customers who focus efforts in getting their applications to work on Windows Vista will ease future migration to Windows 7 and help accelerate their Windows 7 deployment.

Customers who are in the process of deploying Windows Vista or who are considering a deployment to Windows Vista will find their investment in the deployment not only pays off in the value they’ll receive today, but will also put them in a much better place to take advantage of the benefits of Windows 7 moving forward.

We hope this guidance will help you, our business customers, make informed decisions on your Windows deployment plans going forward.