Three quarters of businesses shun SP2 update

With less than two weeks before the deadline lifts on Microsoft's Automatic Update service rollout to desktops, a survey by AssetMetrix Research Labs found only 24 percent of North American companies had deployed the security update. The organization found that popularity of the service pack was less in larger corporates than small enterprises.

"To date, we have observed that 40 percent of companies using Windows XP have actively avoided upgrading to SP2, and only 7 per cent have actively accepted it," said Steve O'Halloran, managing director of AssetMetrix Research Labs.

He added the other 52 percent of the companies showed no direction or policy towards SP2, and "may find themselves having support issues by allowing multiple editions of Windows XP to exist in their infrastructure."

The company surveyed 251 companies and 136,000 computers.

As reported by SC Magazine, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates announced at the RSA conference in February, the next release of Internet Explorer - IE 7, which would only run on SP2. (Report here).

www.assetmetrix.com