That's the vision sketched out by HP CEO Mark Hurd at a meeting with securities analysts in New York last week. Hurd predicted that automation -- not "labor arbitrage," or cutting labor costs through offshoring and other means -- is going to become the leading IT cost-saving tool in the years ahead.

But HP faces some big hurdles in its effort to convince IT managers that Hurd's automation plan will actually lead to major benefits for users.

First, HP has to clean up its own IT operations, which it wants to use as a showcase to convince users that automation can make a difference. The company plans to spend US$2.8 billion on capital improvements during its current fiscal year, much of it on IT projects, including the consolidation of more than 85 data centers into just six facilities. That represents a 40 percent increase over HP's capital budget for the year that ended Oct. 31, when it spent just shy of $2 billion.

Second, HP is going to have to demonstrate that a ratio of one technician for every 200 servers is possible through the use of virtualization and automation technologies. The typical ratio now is about 1-to-20, said Ann Livermore, executive vice president of HP's Technology Solutions Group. Eye on Support Ratios

Dave Dully, chief technology officer at Baptist Health System Inc. in Jacksonville, Fla., has 225 servers running Windows and NetWare, and seven technicians -- or about one for every 36 machines. That's a relatively high ratio, helped by Baptist Health's standardized IT environment. But getting to a ratio of 1-to-200 "is not anything I can envision at this point," because of the uniqueness of individual servers, Dully said.