MANILA - Microsoft officials on Tuesday said at least 15 Philippine companies in different industries have already started using Windows 7 since its launch last month.

ESS Manufacturing Company Inc. (EMCI), a local business process outsourcing firm that participated in the Windows 7 Early Adopter Program, said the compatibility solutions of Windows 7 made it a lot easier for the company to migrate to the new OS without the need to recompile their legacy tools.

"We now run our programs in Windows XP mode within Windows 7," said EMCI Infrastructure lead Mark Cruz told reporters.

Cruz praised the new Windows Bitlocker to Go program, which extends encryption to external drives. He said the new program obviates the need to purchase third-party encryption software and allows them to be more flexible in using external drives.

Ramoncito Balboa, EMCI Technology Deployment Manager, said other built-in features in Windows 7 improved task efficiency and allowed their company to move away from third-party applications such as the snipping tool and file compression.

Renvi Martinez, Transnational E-Business Solutions president and general manager, said Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 was a revelation in terms of live migration and allowed for infrastructure optimization.

Armand Gacho, ACER Product specialist, also praised Windows 7 for minimizing maintenance efforts and reducing systems risk for users.

19% of global IT workforce to use Windows 7

By the end of 2010, more than 7 million people worldwide in the IT industry and at IT-using organizations or an estimated 19 percent of the global IT workforce will be working with Windows 7, according to a study by International Data Corporation.

IDC's forecast for Windows 7 shipments shows a brisk uptake after its October 2009 launch: 177 million units to be shipped by the end of 2010 and 272 million by 2013.

"In the scheme of total IT spending worldwide, the spending on the 177 million copies of Microsoft Windows 7 to be shipped by the end of 2010 will be small -- barely 1 percent of total IT spending and less than 5 percent of total spending on software. But Windows 7 means more than revenue to just Microsoft. It will also drive revenue for hardware companies, other software companies, service firms, and channel firms in every corner of the globe," the IDC study said.

The July 2009 study, which was sponsored by Microsoft, showed that 350,000 IT companies that produce, sell or distribute products or services running on Windows 7 will employ 3 million while another 4 million will be employed at IT-using firms.

IDC's analysis of the IT services market also showed that for every dollar of packaged software sold, there is another $1.24 in revenue to IT service firms. On a worldwide basis, packaged software spending will reach $311 billion by 2010.