7 Ways to Drive Additional Revenue with Windows 7

By  Lisa Terry, Contributing Editor, VSR
With Windows 7 as the heir-apparent to the eight-year-old XP operating system (Vista? What Vista?), VARs are gearing up to lead their customers into the transition. For the smallest businesses, this will happen by default as their typical purchasing venues sell only Windows 7 machines. But the rest will rely on VARs to lead the way, reassure them about their XP applications and highlight new benefits that will impact their businesses.

Windows 7 also gives VARs the opportunity to leverage new capabilities within the operating system family itself, as well as add-ons being marketed by hardware makers. Here are seven ways VARs can take advantage of Windows 7's Oct. 22 release:

1.) Lower VAR support costs: Managed Services providers in particular are eagerly anticipating the lower support costs that come along with replacing an eight-year-old operating system and the older hardware on which it typically resides, since SLAs make them culpable for maintenance. "It makes us more efficient," says Andrew Harper, CIO of Gaeltek LLC, a Managed Services provider in Manassas Park, Va.

"It's easier to manage protocols and be pro-active," says Jay McBain, Levono's director of SMB for the channel. "If you can spend the whole day and not deploy techs, they can focus on high value consulting or integration exercises."

PC Paramedix, IT consultants in Portland, Ore., expects Win 7 to have "significant impact" on its costs because the VAR can support customers with fewer resources while improving the ease of asset allocation, says Charles McLeod, chief mobility officer for PC Paramedix and chairperson of the Advisory Council for OnForce, a nationwide network of more than 13,000 service professionals based in Lexington, Mass. Win 7 is also "much easier to deploy," says McLeod, further impacting VAR costs. Other VARs, however, report upgrades can be slow, particularly from Vista to Win 7.

2.) Develop better touch-driven and other vertical applications. Win 7's touch-friendly features are designed to enhance tablet and other PC touch applications, such as making it easier to move from slate to clamshell mode. Tablets are popular for heavy forms industries such as insurance, utilities and healthcare. Lenovo is including additional touch features in its Win 7 models to improve precision and offer ease of use, such as access to controls and heavily used applications without leaving tablet mode, and its T400s flagship product will feature four-finger multi-touch mode for applications such as photo editing and multi-field selection in PowerPoint.

"We have a medical customer that does a lot of pathology," says Bill Hole, technology specialist for The Hole Group, a Managed Services provider in Simi Valley, Calif. "There will definitely be scenarios where touch will really payoff, allowing them to zoom into a cell image."

Gaeltek's Harper pressed his own touch tablet back into service using Win 7. "It has better performance, the handwriting recognition and signature are snappier, and there are less driver issues. It's so much easier to get around, and more logical. It's great for taking notes. Whenever clients see it, they say 'oh, wow'."

VARs serving scientific and gaming industries will want to leverage DirectX 11, the new GPU acceleration infrastructure, and improvements in memory efficiency, display management, driver model robustness. 

3.) Drive hardware sales. VARs expect a mixture of OS upgrades on current hardware and hardware replacements with the Win 7 release. Win 7 "will translate into a lot of new deals for us," according to The Hole Group.

Peter Cannone, CEO of OnForce, says its service techs expect the economy will push upgrades to the first half of 2010 rather than 4Q, 2009. "If you've laid off 25 people, and the system is running okay, will you be replacing it?," wonders Cannone. However, "we're very hopeful that Win 7 will cause some form of refresh in the market."

4.) Boost customer productivity. VARs can highlight Win 7 features such as a more intuitive user interface, enhanced task bar, better desktop search, preservation of individual user settings and location-aware printing for the downtime they take out of daily work routines.

Hardware vendors such as Lenovo tout the additional layer they add to these capabilities, such as Lenovo's 15 ThinkVantage technologies designed to ease functions such as wireless use, VoIP, deployment and power management. Another function enables VARs to capture images from XP machines for migration to Win 7. "That saves time and money for VARs," notes Lenovo's McBain. "VARs can use tools to migrate an old set of PCs to new faster."

Panasonic's Toughbook notebooks are now outfitted with Qualcomm's Gobi mobile Internet solution. Combined with Win 7's DirectAccess, which provides a bidirectional link between a company's internal network and roaming Windows 7 workers, that "will allow mobile workers the ability to access their company's internal servers through the worldwide, high-speed data capabilities of multiple cellular broadband networks," says Kyp Walls, director of product management  for Panasonic Computer Solutions Company.

5.) Improve customer security. Win 7 adds BitLocker-to-Go for encrypting data on USB thumb drives and other removable media. "The ability to encrypt, and to encrypt removal devices, is key," says Gaeltek's Harper. "We could use third parties for that, but it's part of the deal now."

"You now have people doing more with less personnel," adds PC Paramedix's McLeod. "So if you have people working over the weekend, or remotely," you can ensure that data remains secure whether access via a cloud, on a thumb drive, and so on.

6.) Enable apps. to exploit the power of 64-bit architecture. "Win 7 will really push 64-bit to the front where it should be," boosting performance and productivity, according to The Hole Group.

7.) Remain top of mind with customers. Some VARs began promoting Win 7 to customers back in January, boosting anticipation and filling deployment calendars. "Microsoft gave us the opportunity so much earlier this time," says PC Paramedix's McLeod. "We could be in front of them with a working machine, say 'you try it and tell me what you don't like and want changed,' and together we send a report real-time to Microsoft and two to three days later get an acknowledgement." McLeod also likes being able to report that the OS has been road-tested with customers, not just in labs. Ongoing, VARs can highlight various Win 7 features and the possibilities they enable.