Case Study: Avanti West Coast achieves secure 4,000-user migration and 24/7 service continuity with Quest

Rail service delivers seamless tenant and domain migration

Avanti West Coast, the UK train operator formed when FirstGroup and Trenitalia took over the West Coast Main Line, faced a rapid nine-month IT overhaul to replace a 22-year Virgin-branded hybrid environment. The team needed to rebrand email and systems, migrate 4,000 users (the first of three projects totaling 11,000) and support a highly mobile workforce — all without disrupting critical 24/7 rail services.

Using Quest On Demand Migration, Migration Manager for Active Directory and Secure Copy, the IT team executed granular, pre-staged migrations that rewrote email headers to present a unified Avanti presence, kept mail flowing between old and new systems, and allowed easy rollback when needed. The result: a secure, on-schedule migration of 4,000 users, seamless collaboration across migrated and unmigrated users, significantly reduced business risk and uninterrupted train operations.

Avanti West Coast

Dave Stinton

Technical Solutions Architect