There isn't much about Tom Sanzone that bespeaks drama. The CIO of Credit Suisse is direct, meticulous and practical, and it doesn't seem as if he'd suffer fools gladly, an impression partly informed by his New York accent, nearly shaven head and confident demeanour.

But ask him what virtualization has helped him deliver to Credit Suisse, and you'll get a dramatic answer: tremendous results. He's not just talking about savings reaped from data centre consolidation — which was what the first wave of virtualization projects was all about. Sanzone and other leading CIOs are taking virtualization to the next level. They're using it to become the fast, flexible business partners that CEOs have always wanted.

Sprung out from server farm savings and spreading to Credit Suisse's four core business units, virtualization has become a central piece of the $67 billion financial services company's future

One example: Virtualization has radically changed the way Sanzone's IT group delivers computing power to the company's application-hungry line-of-business units.

The old process of allocating a server box for a business unit — including purchasing, provisioning and configuring the hardware — took weeks or months. Now, Sanzone says, with his growing number of virtualized servers, "it can be done in one day. And we want to move to be even quicker."