One of India's foremost private sector companies with a turnover of Rs 15,000 crore, ITC has a diversified presence in cigarettes, hotels, paperboards and specialty papers, agri-business, packaged foods, IT, personal care, and other FMCG products.

-- Virtualization freed up costly datacenter space and the power and cooling needed to run 44 processors.

-- The project cut the cycle of negotiation-approval-procurement that bogged down IT's ability to deliver

It's a massive business and it wasn't slowing down. But as IT did its best to keep up, the pressure was beginning to show. "On an average, 44 processors of computing capacity was needed by the business to host applications or enhance the performance of existing applications," says Partha Sengupta, CIO and head-IT Shared Services, ITC. "The sizing of this requirement was done by application vendors, who tend to keep buffers at every level, resulting in 50 to 90 percent under-utilization of resources."