Kaz to look to overall value for Vista sell

Despite Microsoft’s hype about Vista’s TCO savings, services outfit Kaz says it will have to rely on more than just a TCO pitch when trying to sell the new operating system to its customers.

Despite Microsoft’s hype about Vista’s TCO savings, services outfit Kaz says it will have to rely on more than just a TCO pitch when trying to sell the new operating system to its customers.

According to Group Manager desktop and infrastructure solutions, Grant Chapman, Kaz will look to educate would-be Vista users on the overall benefit of the new operating system.

“The OS (operating system) doesn’t get us the cost savings. It’s the broad approach – the hardware, service and OS - that does,” he said.

In particular, Kaz educating end-users on the benefits of hardware advancements such as Intel’s V-Pro technology which offers a more secure and power efficient chip.

“There is a slight cost saving when it comes to the integration of security, but desktops have become complex. There are so many applications on the desktop now that weren’t there ten years ago. Supportability is a big cost for us.”

Kaz, which has been part of Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Program for Vista, for the last 12 months has been testing the RC1 beta across Dell, HP, Lenovo and Acer desktops, notebooks and tablets.

The service outfit has also been trialing a number of connectivity clients for remote access and software distribution clients to push both the Vista upgrade and applications such as Office 2007, Chapman said.

“We haven’t had many problems at all. There was some functionality that wasn’t available on laptops, but the platform provided a very stable environment,” he said.

“Microsoft have demonstrated that they understand that Vista needs to be available to numerous manufacturers and hardware configures.

Chapman said that to date Kaz, which has about 200,000 desktops under management, had not piloted Vista with any of its customers, instead preferring to exclusively test the operating system internally.

“We should be prepared to use what we provide to customers,” he said. “That way we can make sure that when release [Vista] to customers we can make sure it’s right.”

Chapman said that Vista showed that Microsoft had undergone a cultural shift when it came to interoperability with the OS containing an extensive collection of drivers for third party applications and hardware.

“It was a happy surprise - they are now focused on getting it right for the end-user,” he said.

“Vista is also a very secure platform, especially with the level of granularity available for policy setting. There are also no issues with third party security vendors - we are working with Symantec around developing a service for Vista and the VPro platform.”

Kaz would also look to develop its range of communications-based services which it could wrap around Vista, Chapman said.

The company expects to begin rolling out Vista deployments to its smaller customers by January with deployments to larger organisations within the year.