Stories by: Leon Erlanger

Anyone who has worked in IT for more than five minutes knows that the field has been in a dramatic transformation for the past 10 years, invading and conquering other organizational domains such as communications and security, while also wrestling with the new issues that technology has wrought such as employee mobility. In most organizations, IT has had to transform itself from a bunch of techies installing and troubleshooting equipment to a key enabler of business strategy and competitiveness.

The energy savings that Verizon Wireless reaped from deploying thin clients and power-management software at its call centers were both dramatic and immediate -- so much so that during initial testing at the company's Arizona call center, the local power utility called to find out if it had moved. All told, the effort has yielded a 50 per cent drop in energy consumption.

Thanks to a massive datacenter consolidation, hardware refresh, and creative, energy-efficient facility design, Sun has reduced power capacity demand by 75 per cent at its California datacenter alone, saving US$1.1 million per year in energy costs, while increasing its datacenter processing power more than four times. Overall, Sun estimates that its consolidation efforts will save 4,100 tons of CO2 per year and cut 1 per cent from its total carbon footprint.

While Todd Sharp is driving down the highway between Charlotte and Atlanta, a new sales order triggers a lookup for the customer phone number and salesperson (that would be Todd) assigned to it. The system then polls Siemens OpenScape UC (unified communications) software and checks Todd's presence status, discovering that he's working remotely and available only on his cell. OpenScape kicks off a VoIP call to Todd's cell phone and, using a text-to-speech engine, reads the sales order over the phone. It then prompts Todd to press 1 to autodial the customer. Minutes after the order arrived, Todd is thanking the customer from his car.

Once the domain of monolithic, multimillion-dollar supercomputers from Cray and IBM, HPC (high-performance computing) is now firmly within reach of today's enterprise, thanks to the affordable computing power of clustered standards-based Linux and Microsoft servers running commodity Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. Many early movers are in fact already capitalizing on in-house HPC, assembling and managing small-scale clusters on their own.

Kenexa, a global provider of talent-hiring and-retention services and software, had a serious customer-satisfaction problem.

Voice over IP is slowly but surely making strides at organizations far and wide. According to Infonetics Research, 36 percent of large organizations were already using VOIP products and services in 2005. And a few are embracing the full promise of VOIP, which is the creative integration of voice and data in ways that change the way people work.

Mobile 3G wireless has had more ups and downs than a Six Flags thrill ride. First, it was built up as a fast-approaching broadband panacea that would keep us connected, outdoors and in, all the time. Then it plunged into ridicule and ultimately obscurity thanks to infrastructure delays, the economic downturn, and competition from coffee shop Wi-Fi.

Server virtualization is an efficient way to save on server hardware costs, real estate, and management resources, but it isn't the only way. Just ask the folks at Avanade, a systems integrator specializing in Microsoft solutions. For one government customer, Avanade had originally designed hundreds of SQL Servers in highly available MSCS (Microsoft Cluster Server) clusters, but the system was spiraling out of control.

Gemstar-TV Guide International hired Ed Sullivan to direct Business Continuity Services in 2003, soon after an audit found that TV Guide's infrastructure was essentially unrecoverable in the event of a sustained crisis.

There is no killer app, but there are four killer business cases where voice and data integration is transforming the way things get done.