BAA runs seven UK airports, including Gatwick, Heathrow and Stansted, servicing 200 million passengers a year with 12,000 operational and security staff. The company is currently implementing a £6.6bn capital investment programme.

“We have a clear five-year plan, with £600m to be spent on IT systems and infrastructure, which includes Windows 7, Exchange and SharePoint rollouts being at the heart of the process of simplification,” said BAA chief information officer Philip Langsdale.

BAA is bucking the trend of firms moving to thin client systems, by moving to Windows-based PCs. “We’re taking a phased deployment approach, because we have a very large Citrix/Wyse environment,” said Langsdale.

“We’re not going to rush deployment, but over the coming months I want to be able to move over to a PC-based world, and only five per cent of our systems could run Windows 7 currently,” he said.

“We have some issues with application migration, but not particularly big ones, because the applications are virtualised already. We’ve also done lots of stress testing on Windows 7 systems ­ it’s been a good, easy migration so far.”