Firms waste 'weeks a year' on upgrades

IT managers spend an average of 44 minutes on each PC or laptop every time software needs to be upgraded, according to research from Citrix.

The survey found that medium to large enterprises have an average of 3,700 PCs, meaning that businesses have to spend around 2,744 hours on every software upgrade.

This would take one person working round the clock up to 16 weeks to upgrade all the PCs in a company of this size.

Unsurprisingly, four out of five respondents said that cost was the biggest factor in deciding how frequently software and hardware resources are upgraded.

"IT teams are wasting the equivalent of a working year simply upgrading their resources," said Patrick Irwin, product manager at Citrix UK, Ireland and South Africa.

"This must be addressed if IT is to achieve its aim of spending less time and money on running computers, and more on contributing to business success."

Citrix believes that desktop virtualisation is the key to solving this problem, especially in the current economic climate.

"You can spend 30 minutes upgrading each desktop, or 30 minutes upgrading the whole estate. Surely this makes desktop virtualisation a no-brainer," said Irwin.