All that fat began affecting the heart of ITC's operations: its datacenter. It had 650 racks and it was so crowded there wasn't enough space for new provisions. It was also pushing the datacenter's cooling and power capacities to their limits.

Sengupta decided to meet these challenges with one elegant solution: virtualization. The technology had the added benefit of creating a more centralized, flexible IT infrastructure. To start, he assessed the utilization levels of existing servers. Those with the least usage were virtualized.

The virtualization license and additional storage cost him just under Rs 30 lakh. But the project, which went live in January 2008, saved ITC Rs 38.08 lakh in its first year. And it will create opex savings of Rs 12.77 lakh from the second year onwards.

In the immediate, it freed up costly datacenter space and the power and cooling needed to run 44 processors. Just the cost of running those processors (without accounting for cooling expenses) will reduce annual power consumption by 72,270 KW.

Beyond the numbers, the project cut the cycle of negotiation-approval-procurement that bogged down IT's ability to deliver. "Now we have minimum waiting time for IT infrastructure deployments, ensuring savings in project timelines and application development costs, and guaranteeing faster time-to-market," says Sengupta. "This is huge business benefit."