Good read here. Steve Schuckenbrock, Dell, speaking about the need to reconfigure IT in the Enterprise.

What else can CIOs do to drive down their costs?

The economics of replacing old hardware with new hardware are pretty good. But the real gains are in rationalization of your applications. How many thousands of applications do you need to run the company? Are there alternatives to which you can migrate users instead of retaining so much redundancy? At Dell we had the same problem. I used to run IT here. We had 10,000 applications; we’ve brought that number down by about half, and by the time we’re done, we’ll bring it down into the hundreds.

What did that do for your hardware needs?

We’ve turned off 10,000 physical servers during the past 12 to 18 months and we’ve virtualized about 30% of the x86 infrastructure. That’s what many CIOs are doing now–rationalizing applications; consolidating and standardizing their infrastructure, which could include modernization of hardware; and virtualizing everything. Virtualization has been incubating for awhile. It’s moving from the experimental stage to becoming the norm.