EUC Local Desktop Program: Migrating 18,000 Employees Off Citrix — $7M in Annual Savings

Situation: Expiring Contracts, Duplicate Spend, and No Program Structure

A national insurance and employee benefits company was operating a large Citrix VDI environment alongside local PCs — creating significant duplicate infrastructure spend for the same users. Several major vendor contracts, including Citrix and Nutanix, were set to expire within a year. Windows 10 was approaching end of support. And the organization's core clinical application, Epic, was transitioning from a Citrix-hosted desktop client to a modern browser-based version.

IT leadership had already initiated a few workstreams independently, but the organization had no unified program structure, no overall plan, no cross-team alignment, and no way to coordinate the migration of 18,000 employees across 30 business units in the US and Canada. The projected $7M in annual savings from eliminating Citrix, Nutanix, and related contracts depended entirely on executing a complex, multi-workstream migration within a hard one-year deadline.

Challenge: Defining a Program — and Executing It — in 12 Months

The client's challenge was not simply a technical migration — it was a fundamental program management challenge. Multiple independent workstreams needed to be organized into a coherent program. Dozens of IT teams across cloud, EUC engineering, security, applications, and learning and communications needed to be aligned. And 30 business unit COOs across the US and Canada needed to understand the migration plan, approve application inventories, and prepare their teams — each on a different timeline.

Compounding the complexity was a ground-up application rationalization requirement. Before any employee could be migrated off Citrix, every application they used had to be inventoried, categorized, and given a disposition: package for local desktop, migrate to an alternative solution, or decommission. Of 723 total applications identified, 251 required packaging, 188 were targeted for decommission, and several required a new virtual delivery solution via Azure Virtual Desktop for applications that could not run effectively on a local Windows 11 machine.

The program had to deliver all of this — application rationalization, application packaging, Epic browser migration, Windows 11 upgrades, OneDrive home drive migration, department file share migration, Azure Virtual Desktop deployment, and a Teams Phone implementation — while executing 21 sequential business unit migrations, all within a single year.

Action: Defining the Program, Aligning 30 Business Units, and Executing 21 Migration Waves

Full On Consulting was brought in to define the program structure from the ground up. The first step was establishing the program governance model — defining an Executive Sponsor, Program Sponsor, and cross-functional Steering Committee, and appointing workstream leads across EUC Engineering, Cloud Engineering, Security, Applications, Business Partners, and Learning & Communications.

The seven program components — Citrix Evac, Windows 11 Upgrade, Endpoint Modernization, Epic Browser migration, Azure Virtual Desktop deployment, Home Drive Migration to OneDrive, and Department File Share Migration — were unified under a single master program plan with cross-workstream dependencies tracked and managed centrally. A weekly status and reporting cadence was established across all workstreams, with monthly Steering Committee reviews and standing team standups to address day-to-day issues in real time.

The application rationalization effort was structured as a three-phase process per business unit: Initiate, Build, and Validate. In the Initiate phase, application inventories were confirmed with each COO, employees were identified, and business and technical teams were aligned. In the Build phase, the EUC Engineering team packaged and unit-tested applications in Microsoft Intune, the Cloud team migrated home drive data to OneDrive, and the L&C team developed training and communication materials. In the Validate phase, packaged applications were smoke-tested, security verified each package, and issues were resolved before go-live approval.

The business unit migration approach used a phased wave model — 21 waves over 12 months, starting with the smallest and simplest business units to build team capability and process maturity before tackling larger, more complex units. Each wave followed an Initiate, Validate, and Go Live sequence, with a post-go-live hypercare period to address user issues and ensure successful adoption. Business unit COOs were engaged throughout — approving application inventories, identifying pilot and UAT testers, approving UAT results, and providing final go-live sign-off.

Applications that could not run on a local Windows 11 desktop — including high-performance insurance applications with significant user bases — were either resolved through vendor upgrades or migrated to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), providing a modern, cloud-based DaaS solution to replace Citrix for users and applications that required a virtual delivery model.

Result: 18,000 Employees Migrated, $7M in Annual Savings, Contracts Retired on Schedule

By defining the program structure, aligning seven IT workstreams, and engaging 30 business units through a disciplined wave-based migration approach, Full On Consulting delivered one of the most operationally complex endpoint modernization programs the organization had undertaken.

All 18,000 employees were migrated to Windows 11 local desktops running the standard endpoint bundle — Microsoft Intune, Tanium, Zscaler, the full Microsoft 365 suite, and the Epic browser application — with home drive data migrated to OneDrive and department file shares transitioned to SharePoint and Teams. Applications that required a virtual environment were delivered via Azure Virtual Desktop, providing a supported, cost-effective successor to Citrix for the specific use cases that required it.

The Citrix and Nutanix contracts were retired on schedule, eliminating $7M in annual duplicate infrastructure spend. The application rationalization effort resulted in 188 applications decommissioned — reducing the overall application footprint and ongoing licensing and maintenance costs. And the organization emerged with a modern, fully supported endpoint environment, a rationalized application portfolio, and a repeatable program execution model for future technology initiatives.

This engagement demonstrates what disciplined enterprise program management delivers: structure where none existed, alignment across dozens of stakeholders, and measurable financial results — all within a hard deadline driven by contract expiration.