Press Release

Cheshire East Borough Council Takes User-Centric Approach to Desktop Transformation with Centrix WorkSpace iQ™

The Council, which operates a Shared ICT service with Cheshire West & Chester Council, has just completed phase one of its discovery and review process across its entire desktop estate, which supports over 4,000 users.  With WorkSpace iQ, the local authority has analysed its installed application and hardware assets and gathered detailed intelligence on how its users consume and use the council’s IT resources.  The deep user and asset insight it has across its computing environment is being used to support decision-making around application licensing, OS migrations and the use of virtualisation across its end-user estate. 

WorkSpace iQ provides a platform for discovering, monitoring and metering IT assets and service consumption across large-scale end-user computing environments. Using WorkSpace iQ, the council’s IT teams have been able to establish: 

• How current resources are being used and how many users are accessing services – from this it has identified a 15 per cent reduction in user support requirements based on the usage of applications
• Empirical data for an optimised Microsoft Enterprise Agreement renewal
• Potential areas of cost saving relating to technology investment because of the 15 per cent fall in user requirements
• A true picture of its application landscape including how core and non-core applications are being used, how users are connecting and where virtualisation can provide greater efficiency

“Our desktop estate is based on Windows XP and so we are making plans to migrate to a supported desktop operating system.  Our current ‘one person, to one desk, to one machine’ approach to desktop delivery is not sustainable.  As we review our options we wanted to understand not only what we have, but what is being used, how and by whom, so that we can make informed decisions about technology change and increase the efficiency and agility of our computing environment,” said Alan Myatt, ICT Programme Manager, Cheshire East.  “Centrix WorkSpace iQ has enabled us to plan for a more flexible, user-centric desktop transformation, as well as identify optimisation opportunities around our current environment along the way.  The quality of our end-user estate data and the speed at which it was delivered by WorkSpace iQ is unique in my experience.”

“By understanding more about the end-user environment and IT consumption patterns, organisations can make strategic investment and planning decisions based on real world analysis of their own unique organisations,” commented Lewis Gee, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Centrix Software.  “A user-centric approach to IT planning is essential for organisations moving to new service-oriented technology platforms such as virtualisation and can deliver measurable return when used to analyse software requirements or support platform migrations.” 

Phase two of Cheshire East Borough Council’s discovery plans will use WorkSpace iQ to identify which users and devices are good candidates for desktop virtualisation.

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