According to Spiceworks Windows Server 2003 end of life (EOL) represents a $100 billion opportunity in migration-related solutions of the hardware, software, cloud-based solutions and associated service variety.
The total comes from "The Great IT Upgrade," a January 2015 survey of 1300 IT professionals in EMEA, N. America and Asia Pacific covering the 14 July 2015 ultimatum of official Windows Server 2003 support.
According to the survey 61% of companies still run Windows Server 2003-- representing millions of installations across the world. Only 15% of respondents have fully migrated, while 48% are partially migrated, 28% remain in the planning stages and 8% have no migration plans.
Of the survey respondents with no migration plans, 85% admit security concerns, 72% are concerned with software compatibility and 66% express worries regarding compliance risks.
When it comes to migrations, 64% of respondents plan to do so with Windows Server 2012 R2, 14% choose Windows Server 2012, 39% are going for Windows Server 2008 R2, 6% choose Windows Server 2008 and Linux/Cent OS are the migration choice of 9%.
As mentioned earlier, migration not only involves an OS replacement. 74% of survey respondents are movin from physical to virtual environments, 34% of which will move to new virtual environments while 31% are moving to an existing virtualised server. 23% plan moves from an existing virtualised server to another virtualised server, and 22% are moving from an existing virtualised server to a new virtualised server.
30% plan to buy new physical hardware and operating systems, 16% are buying standalone server software for existing hardware and only 12% are set to move to cloud/hosted solutions.
"This migration will impact millions of IT professionals and nearly every technology segment including hardware, software, cloud, mobile and services," Spiceworks says. "IT professionals are taking steps to migrate prior to the end of life deadline and technology companies who can offer a clear, elegant migration path have a multi-billion dollar opportunity to help IT departments transition effectively."
