AOL decommissioned nearly 10,000 servers and saved itself $5 million along the way to winning an Uptime Institute contest designed to show the high cost of running inefficient or underutilized IT equipment.

LAS VEGAS -- When data center and facility managers meet with the CIO about new equipment, the conversations are rarely easy. The equipment they seek is often expensive, in the six- or seven-figure range, and justifying the expense can be challenging.

As I've noted a number of times, cloud computing promises both greater IT agility and reduced costs. No one disputes the agility issue. Compared to traditional resource deployment that can drag on for weeks or months, cloud computing offers the enormous improvement of a timetable measured in minutes.

There may come a day when computers take over the business decision-making process.

ORLANDO -- With their budgets seeing little increase, IT managers are being urged by Gartner Inc. to reexamine many of their long-followed IT practices and then, quite simply, kill them .

Unified communications (UC) technology has garnered a fair amount of attention, much of it due to vendors touting their UC offerings as the answer to problems workers have keeping in touch with colleagues, business partners and customers in a highly frenetic, increasingly mobile business world.

Out went 42 aging black and white copiers with interface boxes that let them serve as printers. In went 42 new networked multi-function printers (MFPs) that could do color printing and copying and scan directly to e-mail, fax or files. And the owner, the Park Hill School District in Kansas City, MO, saves $19,000 yearly.

It could be any meeting room, anywhere, with one major difference: The room, within Sheraton on the Park hotel in Sydney, is a gateway to the world. At the push of a button, we are chatting to colleagues in Toronto, Canada, speaking to each other as if we were seated across the table. We see the nuances of facial expressions, hand gestures and presentations, full-size, clear and uninterrupted.

The promise of cost savings derived from cloud computing is attractive, but concrete financial returns are not always quickly achieved. Except, perhaps, when it comes to disaster recovery.

What it is: Telepresence is a high-definition room-to-room video conferencing system marketed by vendors such as Cisco, Polycom and Hewlett-Packard.