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The Group had a very diverse desktop environment as the company has grown by acquiring companies in Europe, South Africa, Australia and North America, each with their own infrastructure. This is not an efficient business environment in which to operate. It makes it expensive to support, manage and deploy new applications. It also means that the company can’t take advantage of the latest management tools and software.
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Avanade was in dialogue with the company on another project (adding Microsoft Office Communication Server to their phone exchanges) when it began to think about a desktop migration. This gave the Avanade team an opportunity to help the customer think about the project and introduce Avanade experts at an early stage.
This early engagement built trust and put Avanade in pole position when a request for proposals was issued and this, plus Avanade’s Microsoft expertise, helped win the deal against strong competition from four rivals. This, despite the fact that Avanade was not the cheapest option.
The Group is a Microsoft house and the likely result is a Windows 7 deployment. However, it also has to support other operating systems and, at this early stage, the company is mindful not to call the project a Windows 7 project.
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Since part of this project is to identify the benefits and ROI of a change, it is too early to quantify likely benefits. But, a consistent, proactively-managed desktop environment is significantly easier and cheaper to manage. Already the project has expanded a little in scope and so it has generated extra business.