Windows 10 to be most popular OS ever in enterprise

Implementation of latest OS to be 'significantly more rapid' than Windows 7

Windows 10 is set to become the most popular operating system ever in the enterprise, according to Gartner.

The analyst claims that by January 2017, half of all enterprises will have started Windows 10 deployments. This will mean, it claimed, that implementation of the OS will be "significantly more rapid" than that seen with Windows 7 when it was released six years ago.

Across the board – for enterprises and consumers – Windows 10 "is poised to become the most widely installed version of Windows ever".

Support for Windows 7 is set to end in January 2020, which is one of several factors Gartner claims is behind the mass migration to Windows 10, along with pent-up demand for tablet and two-in-one devices.

"The net result is that many enterprises are planning to begin pilots for Windows 10 in the first half of 2016, and to broaden their deployments in the latter part of the year," the analyst said. "Gartner expects that at least half of enterprises will have started some production deployments by the beginning of 2017, with an eye to completing their migrations in 2019."

Windows 10 was released at the end of July, and Microsoft claimed it had been downloaded 14 million times in the first 24 hours. By August, that figure had risen to 75 million, Microsoft said.

Gartner made a number of other predictions about the PC market, claiming that by 2018, touchscreens will be installed on a third of all notebooks.

On top of this, the analyst claims that by the same year, almost a third (30 per cent) of all enterprise will spend more on display screens than PCs – signalling the high demand for flexible working.

"All these trends portend a new employee workspace that is more mobile, more capable of working more naturally with humans, and, overall, more productive and secure," said Ken Dulaney, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.