Jason Waxman, Intel's global director of the server platform group, visiting Australia this week, said with more than 90 percent of IT expenditure going towards maintenance there needs to be a "shift towards innovation".

To achieve this, Waxman recommends reducing under utilized servers, client maintenance, and power consumption.

He cited Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA) as one company that used VMware's ESX server to halve its server count. With virtualization, CCA also reduced software licensing and maintenance costs. The company is now using VMware's VMotion product for disaster recovery.

Waxman said while only 2 percent of servers are bought with virtualization built-in, year-on-year growth of 50 percent is expected.

Claiming Intel's professional services arm is expert on virtualization, he said the company's server count has increased 50-fold over the last 10 years, but through virtualization it has created "one gigantic resource pool".