Windows Vista adoption in the chemical industry - Eastman and PPG

This past week, we released Windows Vista adoption case studies for Eastman Chemical and PPG.  The Eastman story focuses on the timing of their refresh cycle and their evaluation of whether to stay on Windows XP or move to Vista.  The Vista decision came from a number of factors, not the least of which is getting better control and limiting administrator privileges to their corporate machines.  As part of their rollout plan, they did a small pilot to their North American IT group of 350 users in October, 2007, and then to the broader global IT group soon after.  After a successful pilot, they began deploying in February, 2008 and expect to be rolled out to most/all of its 10,000 users by August, 2008. 

Eastman is developing some notoriety in fast and efficient deployments.  We have a case study from back in 2006 where they deployed Office 2003 to their enterprise in 5 weeks.  They live the benefits of their standardization, centralization, and consolidation approach - a reflection of our infrastructure optimization model.

While Eastman is upgrading from Windows XP, PPG is upgrading 25,000 desktops from Windows 2000 Professional.  Motivating their upgrade was the decision to deploy Office 2007 to all of its users and to support the latest peripherals their global workforce needs to be successful.  They launched a Desktop of the Future initiative, which included refreshing the access to their standard collaboration tools for Exchange 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007, LiveMeeting 2007, and Office Communications Server 2007.  They are 5,000+ seats deployed as of the middle of this year and plan to complete the rollout by mid-2010.

A couple of approaches coming from a couple different perspectives.  I hope it helps you make a good decision for your company on when and how to best deploy Vista.