It may be almost a decade old and support for the second Service Pack has ended earlier this week , but it seems that Windows XP is still alive and well in the business world. According to Microsoft CVP Tammi Reller, 74 per cent of computers in corporate environments are still running the venerable operating system.

As with any good business though, Microsoft sees opportunity in these numbers. Since a great many businesses skipped Windows Vista altogether, the company sees a huge number of customers who are ready to move up to Windows 7. Now that the first Service Pack for the latest OS is on the horizon, IT departments will see this as an excellent time to start migrating users away from XP.

Reller also reports that the average age of computer hardware in the corporate sector is higher than it has been at any point in the last decade. Probably related to the unwillingness of businesses to refresh their infrastructure, the average age of systems is now thought to be almost five years old.

At this point, it’s redundant to say that XP is old and needs to be retired. Especially as update support begins to end, there are fewer and fewer reasons not to move users up to something more modern. Microsoft knows this all too well, and will probably be pushing harder than ever to sell Windows 7 licences to its corporate clients.