HP Chairman and CEO Mark Hurd (pictured) described how the company is dramatically shrinking the number of its internal servers and data centers by taking a virtualized approach. Hurd's remarks came as part of a keynote presentation he delivered at TUCON 2007, TIBCO's annual user group meeting, in San Francisco.

"IT transformation at HP is pretty significant," Hurd said. "When I arrived at the company, we had a very complex IT infrastructure. As a result of acquisitions, divestitures, etc. we were spending too much money on labor and maintenance."

He said that HP had more than 700 datamarts, 87 datacenters, 20 petabytes of non-shared storage, and were running on 5,000 applications. Since his arrival in 2004, the company has reduced the number of datacenters to three and consolidated 9,000 servers "by virtualizing and blading half the infrastructure."

Noting that "virtualization is a big deal to us," Hurd also said HP has cut the number of apps its uses to 1,400, and can now "provide real-time enterprise financial information, supply chain information, and customer information across the enterprise."

HP company works in a technology partnership with TIBCO to develop joint enterprise solutions for Delta, Proctor and Gamble, PepsiCo, Telecom Italia, and others.