Case Study: Kent County Council achieves rapid Windows XP migration and £2.7M+ savings with VMware Horizon Suite

Kent County Council set to save over £2.7 million while fast tracking XP migration with VMware

Kent County Council, England’s largest local authority serving 1.4 million residents across more than 1,300 square miles, faced an urgent need to move 4,000 devices off aging Windows XP while improving mobility, security and working flexibility and cutting IT management costs. The manual migration effort by a small IT team was slow, costly and posed compliance and data‑sharing risks as the council consolidated sites and expanded remote working.

The council implemented the VMware Horizon Suite (with VMware Professional Services and partner Phoenix Software) to virtualize desktops and applications, automate migrations and centralize management. Devices can now be migrated in under 30 minutes, freeing IT staff for strategic work, virtualizing 300+ business apps, enabling zero‑client and lower‑powered endpoints, and delivering projected savings of more than £2.7 million (including ~£2m hardware, £160k software and £560k in technician time) while reducing core desktop operating costs by about one third and improving citizen services.

Kent County Council

Glen Larkin

Lead Technical Architect