Path to Win 2000 turning into long road for many

Redmond, Wash. - It's been a year since Microsoft shipped Windows 2000, and many IT executives are now facing the sobering reality that the server operating system will take longer to deploy and cost more to roll out than anticipated.

IT executives are responding by lengthening migration schedules, in some cases even doubling the months or years slotted to get the software fully deployed. Many users are initially shunning Active Directory and running Win 2000 as part of Windows NT 4 domains.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is creating more confusion by touting Windows XP, the next version of Win 2000, and .Net, a strategy for delivering software over the Internet, even before Win 2000 adoption has reached critical mass.

"Not one of even my most aggressive customers has completely converted to Windows 2000," says John Kretz, president of Enlightened Point Consulting. "People are slowing down migrations because they don't see the cost benefit."

Win 2000's Active Directory is not only complex technology, but also requires navigation of corporate politics to set it up. Therefore, companies are putting it on the back burner. Without the end-user management gains that the directory promises, organizations don't see obvious cost savings and other benefits of Win 2000, especially if current NT environments are stable. Other major sticking points include staff training and replacing hardware to handle the power-hungry operating system.

"We have switched to taking a back-seat approach," says Michael Sherwood, director of IT for the city of Oceanside, Calif. "At this point, we are not comfortable with migrating from NT domains to Active Directory." He says Microsoft understated the complexity of the migration.

Oceanside planned to have 25% of its 115 servers migrated by now, but has moved only one, which is part of an NT 4 domain. Sherwood now says his migration will take three years.

He says he could pay consultants to set up Active Directory, but still needs to get his staff trained to run the directory once it's in place.

"Our IT budget isn't growing, and we'd rather spend on other infrastructure," Sherwood says. "We don't see dramatic reasons to move, such as cost savings, reliability and administrative gains."

Jeff Allred, manager of network services for the Duke University Cancer Center, echoes Sherwood's sentiments.

"I've doubled my deployment cycle, and I'm not excited about recreating my directory structure from NT to Active Directory," he says. "I may go to a mixed environment with Win 2000 running in an NT domain."

Allred says his rollout is delayed until this summer and will take a year.

The bottom line is that migrations to Win 2000 this year won't be as great as anticipated. Gartner Group says only about 3% of the NT server installed base was converted to Win 2000 last year, and Gartner is revising its conversion estimates for this year. The prediction was 45% to 50%, but now Gartner says it will be closer to 35% Others, such as IDC, predict slightly more than half of NT servers will be converted by year-end.

"We are surprised how slow adoption has been on the server side," says Neil MacDonald, a Gartner analyst. "Microsoft made a critical error in not being forthcoming about the effort required to deploy Windows 2000 and Active Directory."

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, however, was happy last week when he announced that Win 2000 will top one million server licenses this month. But critics say that number includes upgrade deals and downgrade licenses, which let users buy a Win 2000 license but run an NT server. One Microsoft insider says the number of actual new licenses sold may be as low as 200,000.

Microsoft still contends that moving to Win 2000 will pay off for NT customers, reducing total cost of ownership by 18% a year, according to Peter Conway, director of Microsoft's large enterprise server team.

Tom Manter, an Aberdeen Group analyst who last month authored a study on Win 2000 reliability, says to realize cost savings, users need to run applications designed for Win 2000 and run the operating system in a data center-like manner. "If you do those two things, you will see significant improvement in uptime over NT."

Conway admits that users have been stymied by Active Directory. "It's taken a little more time to absorb, but as the knowledge about the directory improves, the migration cycles will shrink."

But for now, migration cycles appear to be growing.

"There is no doubt that IT is resetting its expectations," says David Waugh, vice president of marketing for FastLane Technologies, which develops migration tools for Active Directory. "It's not the technology - it's the sheer logistics of the upgrade. People have learned a lot over the past year."