Hampshire County Council has reported savings of £2m a
year after standardising on a single desktop
environment.
Before the standardisation project, the council allowed each
department to run its own PCs. The savings came from cutting the
number of applications and software versions that the council had
to support.
The project involved the roll out of 8,000 desktop computers to
support more than 11,000 end-users at 400 sites. The IT department
deployed 4,500 thin client terminals from hardware supplier Wyse
and 3,500 Dell PCs. The standardised desktop runs on 120 Dell
Poweredge Citrix servers.
So that the new applications could be held centrally and
distributed over Hampshire County Council's network, the IT
department implemented the latest version of
Citrix Presentation Server running on Windows
Server 2003.
Hampshire County Council's IT manager Dave Reynolds said, "The
challenge was to update and simplify this environment. We wanted to
enable all applications and information to be administered
centrally and supported by the council's IT team while being
delivered to a wide-ranging user base across hundreds of
locations."
Having tested the standardised desktop with its full range of
applications, the council shared what it had learned with another
public sector agency in the county.
Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service deployed a "clone" of the
county council's standardised desktop after seeing how much money
could be saved.
The council said, "Hampshire County Council now has a platform
in place that is supporting shared services with other public
sector bodies within the Hampshire region and is an enabler for
greater partnership working in the future."
The main challenge, said Reynolds, was deploying some of the
specialised local government applications on Citrix.
Hampshire is the largest Citrix user for some local government
applications, and the IT department had to overcome initial
scalability issues.
Reynolds said, "Being able to hold data in one place, and share
it using Citrix software, is good for the integrity of the data and
for the quality of the services provided."
The project cut the total cost of ownership for a desktop to
£461, and the number of desktops per support specialist rose to
671, said the council.
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