This week I had the opportunity to catch up with one of the truly smart guys on IT. Boris Pevsner is one of the founders of Centrata, which made service catalog software, and Lontra, an infrastructure consultancy.

Boris is writing a book about running IT like a business, and he had an interesting question for me. He had always found McKinsey’s thinking on creating “productized” rather than “build-to-order” infrastructure functions compelling since we first started publishing on this topic in 2005, but believed relatively few IT organizations had succeeded in making this change. Why did I think this was, he asked?

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Many times I've watched CEOs or CFOs and CIOs or CTOs talk  about whether their data centers should be more like Google's or not. Almost invariably, the CEO or CFO says something along the lines of: "Whenever we talk about data centers, it's so complicated," or "Why can't our environment be more like Google's, which seems to have a huge pool of resources?" Almost invariably, the CIO or CTO will respond that Google isn't a good comparison because it just runs one big application, ie search.

I tend to think this discussion tends to miss two key points--data center scale and application age:

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Is this downturn – with its global scope finally going to be the tipping point for mass adoption of video conferencing as a business tool. The cost for the units has fallen dramatically, as has the cost of the backbone network (although it remains significant). And voice quality is better than you get over the phone line.

At McKinsey we are a bit of test bed for my assertion. Over the last 18 months to the end of 2008 we have installed close to 500 HD desktop units, a dozen or so immersion rooms and a host of more basic room-level solutions.

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