Vox pop: What's Windows 7's end of life doing for your business?

Geoff Augutis, managing director, Queensland Computers

I believe that the EOL of Windows 7 is a positive thing for the channel and customers. Whilst we haven’t seen any sales increase for new machines yet, it will come if managed.

Most clients understand the value behind having up to date and reliable hardware, but often struggle to replace something that still works. This gives our team a reason to bring it up and gives the customer a good justification to replace hardware that is otherwise functional.

I’ve never had a customer regret spending ~$1000 on a new machine for their business. However, every week we have clients tell us how much difference it has made to them, their staff, their productivity by replacing all of that old and out-of-date software and that they wish they did it years ago.
I think the Windows 7 EOL is just the nudge that many people need.

Justin Lowe, director, ASI Solutions

ASI Solutions has definitely seen an increase in uptake on device sales based on the upcoming end of life for Windows 7. The result being an overall business increase for device sales along with support in getting customers to Windows 10.

The business currently has customers who are not quite ready and therefore we are working with them on implementing a transition plan into those organisations around what, when and how the transition is going to look within its own business.

This has meant having a rush for devices left in the market at a certain specification to ensure image continuity during the transition and planning stage.

Being a large Microsoft partner, it also has allowed us to showcase our ability to strengthen our support with accounts we might have just supplied hardware to.

Brian Townley, general manager, C3 Group

At C3 Group we’ve seen no noticeable increase in PC sales in the past 12 months, apart from that of organic growth.

That said, our customer success managers are very proactive in assisting clients with budget road-mapping and asset management. Back when Microsoft offered Windows 10 upgrades for free, we were doing stacks of them – which has seemed to extend the life of PCs for some clients.

I believe those clients still running Windows 7 would typically be doing so due to legacy systems, whereby the Windows 7 end-of-life may force a larger upgrade – perhaps a full migration to cloud (new SaaS platform or similar).

Compare that to the Windows XP EOL, where there wasn’t any offer for a free upgrade to the latest OS.

I suspect back then that clients saw a better ROI to purchase new PCs that were bundled with the latest OS.