The other thing we're doing a lot of now is standardization of the way we deploy servers. So they're deployed in a much quicker way. We also incent our businesses to choose standardization over customization.

Do you have an example of your supply and demand approach to IT management?

Tiered storage is a great example of what comes out of a supply and demand management approach. We can give you tier one storage or tier five storage for your business. One's higher cost and one's lower cost. If I can work with you on your business characteristics and what you need, then you're going to help us drive our costs down. We've seen tremendous benefit on that front. Then we've put a lot of work into getting our cost per gigabyte [of storage capacity] down and focusing on those types of matrixes. As [we are] focused on being a supply and demand strategy ... we created a three-pronged approach of stabilize, standardize and optimize.

So you also have to be mindful that not everything will be in a stage where it's ready to be optimized. We think many IT professionals make that mistake -- getting into a optimization phase of a technology when in fact they should be stabilizing and standardizing it first in order to position it. In the case of storage, or even virtualization, we take the approach that we should walk before we run. Let's not put the production environment at risk. Let's get to a common platform and put common technologies in place.

How do you integrate a heterogeneous storage environment?