Initially there were 20,000 Citrix desktops but, utilising ManagementStudio’s discovery feature, 6,000 desktops were identified as not being used. Alongside the savings achieved by reducing AVD licenses by 6,000, ManagementStudio also enabled the migration team to shave nine months off the project timeframe. The cost savings that ManagementStudio has delivered in just man-hours alone are estimated at over £160,000.
AVD provides the bank greater flexibility than Citrix and continues to provide cost savings, as AVD can be turned off if not being used. The users of AVD have reported back that the start up is instantaneous with AVD versus the rather long and cumbersome login timescales with the previous Citrix environment.
The project manager commented, “It was a challenging endeavour, but ManagementStudio proved to be a game-changer. With its robust capabilities and seamless integration we were able to automate repetitive tasks, enhance communication, efficiently manage complex data sets and, most importantly, provide the best user experience.”
ManagementStudio has been embedded in the bank’s infrastructure for nearly ten years and has been utilised for numerous transformations and migrations. These include Windows 7 to Windows 10, where around 100,000 users were migrated as part of a digital workplace transformation, along with migrating users’ home drives to Microsoft OneDrive and 250,000 mailboxes migrated to the cloud. The bank has also used ManagementStudio to consolidate over 3,500 applications to around 1,000.
By centralising the bank’s data in one repository, ManagementStudio uses the same data for different projects, depending upon the parameters the programme or project manager selects. This has delivered immense efficiencies for each transformation, including the removal of manual errors.
During the pandemic, ManagementStudio was also used to accelerate the bank’s work from home strategy, as only 60% of employees had laptops. The use of ManagementStudio to manage the project to deploy laptops to the remaining 40% of staff resulted in a rapid time to deploy and, according to the CEO, kept the bank running.
