Online doesn't exist without technology; online is technology. So are social media and your company's effort to monitor and respond to conversations about your brand that are happening on the Web. Nearly all the functions that are critical to marketing are technology- driven-forecasting demand for products, generating leads, delivering your message. And on and on. Sales, service, communication-all are inextricably linked to technology. The data center is the very least of it.

When Dell recognized this paradigm shift several years ago, we realized that we had 8,000 applications on our servers, many of which duplicated the functions of the others. As Dell grew, each department had chosen its own software and housed it on a dedicated server. So we worked with each division to choose standards and we've reduced the number of applications to 2,200 and counting (down). We automated processes like resetting a user password or reimaging a client system, freeing up the service desk to focus on more-critical issues.

We were also running 24,000 physical servers when virtualizing would eliminate the need for a whopping 6,000. Our environment was relying on the most expensive storage for every piece of data, when tiering our data and reducing duplication could lower our storage costs by 50 percent. Some applications were running on expensive Unix platforms, even while open standards were five or 10 times cheaper. Now we're saving more than $300 million per year-all of which leaves budget dollars that can be allocated to innovation rather than maintenance.

And of course all of this work to increase our data centers' efficiency is good for the planet, since we no longer needed to build the new data center we were planning. (While many companies are building new so-called "earth-friendly" , we believe that the greenest data center is the one you never build.)

As of today we're about 70 percent of the way there, and we expect to finish standardizing and streamlining our systems in late 2012. We aren't devoting our resources to this project with a specific goal-to make a particular change or release an upcoming product. That's the point. Rationalizing the underpinnings of every technology that Dell uses to conduct business will increase our agility and speed, and speed is the goal.