Gaining efficiencies through virtualization first required a change of language to get business buy-in David Reilly has led Credit Suisse, one of the world’s leading financial services companies, to a virtualized IT infrastructure and has become an expert on the ins and outs of the technology required. When you ask the managing director of technology infrastructure services what it took to succeed in the project, though, Reilly says it really came down to language.[ Discover what insights you can take advantage of from the other 2008 InfoWorld CTO 25 winners. ]The problems Reilly was trying to solve weren’t unique to Credit Suisse: Users wanted more services, applications and resources, and they were trying to push toward those goals by buying more servers. Reilly launched a program to change how resources were deployed, but to attain the results the organization wanted (some of which aren’t scheduled to be seen for some time), Reilly felt he had to change the conversation within the company. “It had become obvious to us that the earlier model, of one server to fulfill a function and only that function, sitting idle when the application wasn’t in use, was something that we couldn’t sustain — it made no business sense. So what we tried to do was position virtualization not as a strategy, but as the way that we provide compute infrastructure to the business,” Reilly says.“We didn’t talk about all the technology changes, one operating system or hypervisor versus another, because our business isn’t interested in those things. What the business understands is return on investment. They cut large checks every year; what do they get in return? We said to the business, ‘We can dramatically improve the ROI and solve problems around being nimble, and solve problems around needing ever more datacenter space, and we can provide a better return on the capital investment you give us every year if we adopt virtualization, not as a strategy, but as a way of doing business.'”[ Explore the possibilities of virtualization in InfoWorld’s special report ] Changing the conversation enabled the change to the infrastructure. Reilly was able to drive a reduction in original server fleet count of 10 percent in 2007, with a goal of reaching a total reduction in the original server fleet count of 15 percent in 2008. In the process, server utilization increased from about 5 percent (on par with the industry average) to more than 20 percent. In the process, energy consumption fell dramatically, storage resources are used more efficiently, and internal customers are happier because their costs to achieve a given level of service have gone down.Reilly’s aim is an organization that thinks in terms of IT resources rather than boxes. He believes that he will achieve the goal by engaging the rest of the organization in a business discussion — not a technology one — about infrastructure, applications, and services. Careers