So we looked to take redundancies out of the stack, to narrow it down to a certain set of vendors we felt comfortable with, and we did a lot of bake-offs. Since we are a security first organization, we pretty much encrypt everything. And we have to move large encrypted transactional databases across the wire. So where a lot of the architecture engineering time went was making sure we had that down, because it's one thing to say you encrypt a few pieces of data, it's another thing to say you have terabytes of data being encrypted across the wire.

That's one area we spent a lot of time working with partners on, looking for the absolute simplest way to do that. I don't know how much time you spend with security guys, but the word "simple" and "encrypt" generally don't go in the same sentence.

What did you end up with after the simplification effort?

Well, on the side we started out with the four top-tier vendors and baked it down to one. On the storage side, we had three vendors and baked it down to one. In encryption technology, we really only had three or four vendors we could look at and got that down to one. Load balancers, we had two companies we've worked with over the years and narrowed that to one. Virtualization, we looked at three top-tier ones and narrowed that to one. I have to say virtualization was kind of a horse race, actually. Surprisingly enough, the last time I did this four years ago, it wasn't much of a race, but we had several compelling reasons to go either way with the virtualization vendors.

How about application count? Did you whittle that down too?