It seems that the more Microsoft touts the benefits of its Vista operating system to the enterprise, the more resistance it runs into from IT executives who simply cannot justify the upgrade and migration costs.

According to new research from appliance vendor KACE, more than 90 percent of IT professionals were still not sold on the virtues of Vista, with only 1 percent reporting that they had fully migrated over.

While the cost of migration was topmost in respondents' concerns, there is also widespread apprehension over the system's performance load and memory requirements. And while nearly half of those surveyed say they would consider migrating to a non-Windows OS, most concede the eventual takeover of Vista as new hardware investments are made. The report is available at the KACE website here.

Microsoft hopes to win over more of the IT industry with the release of Service Pack 1 early next year. Previews went out this week, and while it did contain some fixes and performance enhancements, there were no new features to be had.

Microsoft also has a new set of Vista migration tools, including the Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) 5.0, Windows Vista Hardware Assessment (WVHA) 2.1, and User State Migration Tools (USMT) 3.0. But even if these tools do address some of the migration issues, Vista is still hampered by the widespread impression that it does little to advance enterprise efficiency or functionality beyond what is already available on XP.

More than likely, Vista adoption will continue to trickle in over the next two years as hardware refresh cycles kick in, even as rival OS providers seek to wean customers away during the transition period. And if virtualization continues its steady march into the enterprise, it won't be long before multiple OSs start showing up on the same network, so you'll be able to pick whatever operating environment suits your fancy at any given time.