Oi! Get out of my Data Centre

As Microsoft prepares to launch the next iteration of its Windows platform, Windows XP, the company will take little relief from the news that CIOs still do not rate the company's products as "enterprise class".

The latest study from Morgan Stanley has discovered that, when it comes to Microsoft's products, there is a long way to go before they will find their way into the data centre of large organisations.

Morgan Stanley asked the questions as part of its regular CIO series of surveys, which sees the firm questioning more than 200 CIOs about core issues, and it found a lack of belief in the Microsoft product set.

On Microsoft's database for instance, only 16 per cent of CIOs thought that SQL Server was ready for the enterprise, while 32 per cent thought it was almost ready for the enterprise. Twenty Nine per cent said that SQL Server was a long way off being enterprise ready and 23 per cent had no opinion.

It's not just SQL Server that fell under the spotlight however, in the report the respondents were also asked to consider when NT would be ready to tackle the dominance of Unix in the enterprise space. And once again Microsoft clearly has to knuckle down to some hard work. The majority, 33 per cent, of respondents reckoned that Microsoft's NT was two to three years away from being enterprise ready and 27 per cent said that they considered NT to be between three and five years away from being ready for the data centre.

Interestingly, only 0.8 per cent in total felt that NT had already made it. But there was a slice, 18 per cent, of supporters that felt that NT would be ready for the data centre next year.

The reasons cited by respondents for Microsoft's failure at the top-end however were nothing surprising. A massive 60 per cent of CIO's from the US's leading companies said that Microsoft's NT product fell short in terms of reliability; 56 per cent said that it fell short in terms of scalability; 37 per cent said it failed when it came to performance and 14 per cent said cost was the main inhibitor. Only 21 per cent said that NT did not have any problems.

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