Companies still wary of XP Service Pack 2

Half of US IT managers fear that migration to Microsoft Windows Service Pack 2 (SP2) will create serious business continuity issues, newly released research has claimed.

Almost three-quarters of the IT managers surveyed by support firm SupportSoft said that their biggest concern was compatibility with other applications.

Despite these concerns, almost 80 per cent of IT managers surveyed plan on deploying SP2 within the next six months.

Half of the respondents said that better protection against viruses and worms will be the biggest benefit they will receive from migration to SP2.

An additional 37 per cent felt that their company would benefit from the significantly increased security that the upgrade can bring.

"Because the effects of SP2 are far reaching, it can expose many gaps between end-users, the help desk and IT desktop management," said Chris Grejtak, senior vice president of products and marketing at SupportSoft.

"If these groups do not co-ordinate with one another, companies may compound the technical issues that arise during migration."

The survey was conducted for SupportSoft by InsightExpress, an independent research firm which surveyed 117 IT managers at companies of 500 or more employees.