This sneaking around is, in part, a response to the fact that some LOB chiefs have become married to their servers. These executives are "server huggers", and they can be very territorial about their boxes. But it's those server huggers, and their demands for loads of computing power for their applications, who are one of the chief causes of server sprawl in the CIOs' data centres.

At Arch Coal, Abbene was feeling the heat. "We were just getting inundated — one application, one server, one application, one server, and it was again and again," he recalls.

He's tried to keep the virtualization conversations simple. "When I explained to management about virtualization as a concept, it was just as easy to say, 'You take 30 computers and run them on one'," he says. Their response: "Oh, OK."

CIOs don't need to delve into the technological specifications of virtualization, as Sanzone and Abbene's examples prove. Businesspeople can easily understand getting their servers faster — from weeks or months down to just hours or one day.

Using VMware-based virtualization, AIG Technologies, which makes insurance-related IT products, has cut server provisioning time by 50 percent — from six hours (when a physical server already was available onsite) to just three hours. Whereas provisioning a new server from offsite typically takes six to eight weeks, CIOs like Sanzone can now answer business requests for new server power with responses like: "How about tomorrow?"