Close to 60% of Windows machines are still on Windows 10, which stops receiving mainstream support from Microsoft on October 14, 2025. (That, to spell it out, means no more free software updates or security patches.)
As The Stack recently noted, complications can abound when making the shift. Multinational Hitachi Energy however, says it has now successfully migrated over 40,000 devices across 12 countries to Windows 11. (It assessed 45,335 devices and identified 43,568 as ready to be upgraded.)
The migration began in March 2024 and wrapped up in October 2024. At its peak, Hitachi Energy migrated 10,000 devices during May alone.
"Minimal manual intervention"
Hitachi Energy wanted to “upgrade our estate with minimal manual intervention and avoiding the need to individually test every application,” said its global head of end user computing, Marco Rena this week.
The $13 billion revenue energy firm ran a 500-device pilot in November 2023 – verifying application and hardware compatibility for Windows 11 using software from company ManagementStudio, and integrating it with Intune, Active Directory, Flexera Service and ServiceNow, he said; with some PowerBI integrations offering “enhanced data mining reports.”
Some 2,330 of Hitachi Energy’s 3,034 applications were found to be compatible. What did it do about the remaining 704, The Stack asked?
“The simple answer is that we made them compatible.”
“Either they have been updated or we took a risk-based approach upgrading some PCs and checking issues. When no issue was determined than everyone was upgraded. Non-compatible doesn’t necessarily mean not working…” Rena told The Stack cheerfully in an emailed comment.
The Windows 11 upgrade process was implemented on a “by exception” basis Rena said. It requested pilot users for the new OS, ran it for a few weeks to catch any application issues and used data from the pilot as the basis for “confidently selecting more desktops throughout the business.”
Platform help started with a TSA
A lot of the automated migration was handled using ManagementStudio. That’s a software platform that lets users create workflows, automate migrations, handle testing and provides a management hub for projects like Hitachi Energy’s Windows 11 migration.
ManagementStudio co-founder Justin Pickup said the platform was first used by Hitachi Energy for its divestment from ABB, helping it exit its Transition Service Agreements (TSA) in June 2023, avoiding significant overrun costs.
TSAs let organisations manage two operating models until the companies formally split. As Pickup explained to The Stack: “The parent company provides a support agreement for all the devices, applications, service desk, networks, servers, data centers etc whilst the new company formalises their Target Operating Model. Once this is in place, the new company is paying for both legacy support and new operational support.
“Unfortunately, most TSA’s are… very punitive on the new company, so if the timelines go past target, it’s a great way to make a bit more money.
“One of the major challenges was actually decommissioning the services, devices etc from the legacy operating environment and actually communicating that back to the TSA. With a mixture of automation, email comms (containing data mining reports), historical change reports and specific workflows, this was easily achieved with ManagementStudio.”
Of the more recent Windows 11 migration, he noted that “many companies have excellent data through InTune, SCCM, ServiceNow, Active Directory. The challenge is actually providing the context around that data that will enable you to achieve… a destination project/technology.”
On the TSA “you can’t divest a company without knowing how many people are in the company, where they work, what teams they are in, the apps they use and the devices they log into. This linkage of info is what we call “data with context” and is the basis of all the projects we work on.
He added: “The next step is being able to provide controls around that data. Controls such as workflow, historical change governance, automation, reporting, datamining. Again, there are tools out there that can help with these (Excel, ServiceNow, Jira etc) but incorporating the data in context is challenging… Having a portal to display info to disparate engineering teams, delivery managers or project managers [is also vital as is the] ability to see all of that contextual data in a relevant way for your team, being able to allocate deliverables, write notes, etc.”
