Pulse 2011: IBM outlines $4.1bn saving from IT consolidation

LAS VEGAS: IBM used the opening keynote of its Pulse service management event as a call to arms for IT managers to consolidate their infrastructure to achieve 'smarter computing'.

Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM Software & Systems, had a clear message for the 7,000 delegates in Las Vegas on Monday.

"Doing more computing with fewer boxes is a good thing fundamentally. Anyone thinking otherwise is not thinking clearly," he said.

Urging IT managers to move from sprawl to consolidation, Mills outlined a series of statistics to back up his point. He highlighted the 1.2 zettabytes of data that exist in the digital universe and the 32.6 million servers in operation worldwide, a number that is growing at a rate of six times per year.

Conversely, IT budgets are increasing at a rate of less than 0.8 per cent per year, pressuring CIOs to do more with less, while the cost of running and maintaining the millions of servers far outweighs the amount spent on new equipment.

"If you haven't got the message, I'm telling all of you to get rid of IT," Mills said. "Put it on eBay … clean the place up."

Mills took a hard line with anyone disagreeing with his dictum, explaining that, while people in IT and across the business are entitled to have an opinion on what they should consolidate, "the facts are that the less you have, the lower the cost".

IBM has undertaken a huge operation to shrink its own infrastructure over the past 14 years. In 1997, Big Blue had 155 host datacentres, 80 web hosting centres, 31 networks and 15,000 applications.

Today that's been reduced to seven datacentres, five web hosts, a single network and 4,700 apps, leading to a saving of $4.1bn over the past five years, along with an 80 per cent reduction in energy use.

Mills could not resist the opportunity to plug the mainframe, citing IBM's 5.2GHz microprocessor zEnterprise system as an ideal way of achieving IT consolidation.

"Why fragment your workloads onto thousands of computers? You can bring in Intel and Power blades to create a hybrid environment," he said. "You can run thousands and thousands and thousands of concurrent jobs."

Mills also took a swipe at the competition, although not quite to the level of the banter expected from chief executives like Oracle's Larry Ellison or Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff at their customer events.

HP, Dell and Oracle/Sun were all name-checked as criticising mainframes because they are not in that line of technology.

"People say stupid crap every day. It doesn't mean you have to listen to it, " Mills quipped.