The other day, HP, the industry's resident smarty pants, let drop that starting this fiscal year - which is now, oh, five or six weeks old - it will save a billion dollars a year on IT compared to 2005 - although it's added upwards of $25 billion in revenue since then.

COO Randy Mott, the guy who wrought this transformation, said it wasn't just a technology initiative in the IT organization, it was a "business strategy adopted throughout the company."

As a result, HP has already reduced its IT operating costs by approximately half and figures it's provided more reliable information for executives to make better business decisions and established a more simplified and dependable IT infrastructure that provides improved business continuity and supports the company's future growth.

The transformation focused on five major initiatives: next-generation global data centers, portfolio management, workforce effectiveness, building a world-class technology organization, and an enterprise data warehouse using of course HP's homegrown NeoView database.

Naturally HP had to spend money to save money, but doesn't say how much and would love to get customers doing the same thing.

The transformation is expected to enable HP to:

• Reduce spending on internal IT from approximately 4% of revenue in 2005 to less than 2% in 2009.
• Consolidate more than 85 internal IT legacy data centers globally to six in three geographic locations. These datacenters have 342,000 square feet of computing "white space" - expandable to more than double that amount - to accommodate growth.
• Consolidate more than 6,000 applications running the business to approximately 1,500 standardized applications.
• Reduce annual data center energy consumption by 60%.
• Decrease the number of servers by 40% while increasing processing power by 250% complements of virtualization and energy-efficiency technologies.
• Reduce networking costs by 50% while tripling bandwidth.
• And last but not least eliminate more than 700 data marts and create one enterprise data warehouse where employees can access consistent data to make business decisions.

By creating global and common applications, HP says IT can focus on new capabilities and devote 80% of its employees to innovation aligned with business strategies and future growth opportunities.

HP's in-house Neoview implementation currently has 32,000 HP employees as users - a number expected to top 50,000 next year. HP believes its Neoview installation is one of the largest enterprise data warehouses in the market today.