At a recent vendor conference, someone threw out a number 10-12 million servers worldwide still running production applications on Windows 2003. It’s unclear if this estimate is accurate but I imagine there are a lot of Windows 2003 servers out there still running production applications.
Whilst the number of
servers out there is much smaller than the number of PCs, the task of migrating
is much more complicated and the risks greater.
Most Windows 2003 servers shipped between 2002 and 2007 and given normal
server lifecycles and corporate asset replacement cycles many will already have
been retired. However, I still see
Windows 2003 servers at sites and usually this is due to the legacy
applications that are not supported on newer versions of Windows.
We all know if it was easy
to replace an application or the ROI to do so is compelling it probably would
have been done already. Establishing
business cases, finding suitable replacement applications and testing new
versions all take time and I sense that, even though the date is over 14 months
away, the urgency is building.
It doesn’t need to be
all doom and gloom though. This presents
a great opportunity to look for modern applications delivered in alternative
ways. Not only is it an opportunity to
move applications into the cloud but also to consume them differently.
The subscription models
now available also change the financial impetus as the monthly expense is
smaller and more immediate. Paying for
applications as they are consumed removes the requirement for developing
business cases for capital expenditure, saving time and effort.
Instead of thinking
about the task of replacing a server and an application I think this is a great
opportunity to deploy modern applications, without any infrastructure
requirement, and to move away from traditional “shift and lift” upgrades
permanently.
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