Voca, the UK-based payments agency formerly known as BACS, bears the responsibility of processing the salaries of every single UK worker. It processes 5 billion transactions a year, adding up to a combined value of around e5 trillion.

It is, according to head of desktop and web infrastructure, Irene Blaston, essentially an IT-led business. But before the company set about implementing its desktop application virtualisation strategy, keeping tabs of exactly what IT was being used was an overwhelming task. Faced with major organisational change, the situation became untenable.

“Before this project, we hadn’t locked the desktop design down,” she recalls. “We were bombarded with hundreds of different requests for applications from our developers. In the end we didn’t actually know how many applications were out there.”

Installing and integrating so many different applications for Voca’s 700 users was not only time consuming, but it also had a high failure rate, as conflicting applications would frequently crash.

It was, Blaston admits, essential to instill a greater degree of centralised control over the desktop environment. And that required a complete audit of what applications were out there. Every single user was interviewed about their particular requirements.

“This was extremely labour intensive,” Blaston explains, “but it did mean that we knew what everybody needed. We also took this as an opportunity to allay their fears about what changes were going to happen.”

This information allowed Blaston to identify which applications the users really needed, and which they kept out of habit. For example, as many as four different FTP packages were being used across the organisation. “It is amazing how much people try and hold on to software, and how expensive that is,” she says.

The masterstroke in the desktop rationalisation project was the decision to employ virtualisation technology. Each of the 250 applications that made it through the cull was packaged as a virtual application service running on servers in the data centre.

The virtualisation technology employed by Voca – SoftGrid from Softricity , a 500-person virtualisation start-up acquired by Microsoft in May 2006 for an undisclosed sum, ‘sends’ only as much of the application to the client as is required by the user, making them run quickly and smoothly.

In order to capitalise on this central control over applications, the company developed an interface that allows Blaston to quickly grant user accounts access to applications.

This has brought multiple benefits. Firstly, provisioning new applications or new users is now a quick and easy process, a matter of checking tick boxes rather than installing and integrating new applications. Thanks to this, Voca now allows users to ‘hot-desk’, as all desktops are fitted with the same standard client software.

Similarly, Blaston now has a comprehensive view of how many people are using which applications. This means that the company need pay no more in licence fees than is strictly needed.

A user may need, for example, access to business process visualisation software for 10 days while they complete a particular project. After that, access can be taken away from them and granted to somebody else. In this, licenses can be shared between users. Blaston adds that while some software vendors were better than others in accepting this, nothing she tried was impossible.

The process of upgrading software is also made simpler and less obtrusive, as instead of going through each individual desktop making the necessary changes, support staff need only apply the upgrade to the central servers over night, and all users have the upgraded application the next day.

But the biggest benefit of all was that with the new found control over its desktop environment, Voca is far better placed to prepare for the growing demand for its services.

“Next year, we may open a new office in Europe,” says Blaston. “Two years ago, that prospect would have terrified me. Now I can deal with it.”