IT analyst firm Gartner has gone ahead and talked about an area that many IT managers or CIOs must have been pondering ever since the public availability of Microsoft's Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) operating system.

In a research paper, Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Stephen Kleynhans are advising businesses to "Skip Vista and target Windows 7."  This applies for all organizations ranging from enterprises or SMBs not already midway into deploying Windows Vista. The rationale here is simple; it takes the same amount of effort planning a deployment of Windows Vista as Windows 7.

In addition, simply deferring any scheduled Windows Vista upgrade in favor of the arrival of Windows 7 would benefit users by reducing the number of changes they need to adapt to. Certainly, it would be easier convincing management over one operating system switch, compared to two that are practically back-to-back.

For now, Microsoft has already said that there will not be another release candidate before Windows 7 ships. With this in mind, it is clear that barring an incident completely out of the blue, we can expect Windows 7 to hit the market as a finished product on schedule - just before the holiday season.

Indeed, even businesses that might be halfway through planning a Windows Vista migration are urged to consider scrapping the deployment plans. For organizations already in the midst of deploying Windows Vista, though, Gartner advises that they should plan to migrate to Windows 7 either in late 2010 or early 2011.

For the non-initiated, I have highlighted some of the key features in Windows 7 that SMBs will be interested in.