Jessica Mehroin Irani & Shelley Singh MUMBAI/DELHI

Their ideas changed the world. Now, new ideas are changing them.

Global giants such as Google, Yahoo and IBM and Indian biggies like Bharti Enterprises, Raymond, Microland and Mahindra & Mahindra, among others, are using new technologies and concepts like cloud computing, virtualization and unified communications to save money in these tough times.

So, we have large companies bringing down literally the clouds (ah, cloud computing), enterprises and individuals preferring stripped down leap-tops over fully-loaded laptops, unified communications rather than travel, virtualization techniques rather than spending on expensive servers and so on. While companies are not going overboard on investing in any new technologies, they are banking on the ones that help save costs and that's where these score. In this tough environment, "companies will reorient their businesses and look at technologies that offer practical benefits and a competitive edge," says Oracle India managing director Rrishan Dhawan.

Companies across India Inc, including Bharti Enterprises, Raymond, Microland, Mahindra & Mahindra, Atrenta India, BPCL, Chitale Dairy, i2 Technologies, Macawber Beekay, Religare, First-source and others, are deploying such cost-saving solutions. One such solution, cloud computing, has been much sought after. "Economic downturn is spurring the shift to cloud computing. Companies are attracted to t he cost effectiveness of t he cloud. Google applications have 10 million active users worldwide and we offer the entire suite (includes messaging, Google docs) for $50 per user per year. 2009 will be the break-out year for cloud computing," says Rajen Sheth, senior product manager at Google Apps.

Cloud computing is a new, better and cheaper way of delivering enterprise IT. When people talk about "plugging into the IT cloud', they generally mean browser access to an application hosted on the web. Companies like Google, Yahoo, IBM and others are betting big on cloud computing as the next big ve - hide to cut costs and host enterprise applications. Its attractiveness is in low costs and ease of scalability.

"In this economic environment, customers want to see return on investment in the short term. They all want to cut costs as the top line is decreasing, "says Tarun Gulati, GM, marketing & operations, Microsoft India.

Going beyond the clouds, Mr Gulati has other interesting cost-saving ideas on mind. Like virtualization. He explains: A server typically uses about 15% of its full capacity. Each operating system or application requires a dedicated server for it to run - as a result of which, companies end up deploying multiple servers to support multiple applications. While all resources of the server may be occasionally required to run the application - for the majority of time, the server remains unutilised when its application is n o t under use and keeps guzzling precious power. As a result, companies end up footing enormous electricity bills for running the power hungry systems. This is where virtualization steps in. It helps optimise use of computing resources — making do with fewer systems.

In 2008, Microsoft (India) spent $500 million on servers, of which about 7 0% was redundant capacity. "We could have saved about $350 million," Mr Gulati says. Wipro Technologies, Manipal Group and Mcroland are a few Mcrosoft customers which have adopted virtualization of servers in the last few months. With virtualization, one saves on space rental cost as well since it helps create a virtual space and saves on physical space. Avanade (a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft) will save over $8,3 5,000 over the next five years on hardware expenses and rack charges due to virtualization.

The global pioneer in virtualization technology, VMware, has 550 customers in India and over 230 partners to support business expansion across t he country. "VMware customers have reported dramatic results including 60-80% utilization rates for x86 servers (up from 5-15% in non-virtualized PCs): cost savings of more than $3,000 annually for every workload virtualized; ability to provision n ew applications in minutes instead of days or weeks and 8 5% improvement in recovery time from unplanned downtime," says Ganesh Maha-bala, regional director, VMware India & Saarc. After server virtualization it's the networks that will go virtual.

Another cost-saving measure that companies are taking up is Unified Communications to trim travel budgets. Microsoft saved $ 5 million with unified messaging through reduced hardware and maintenance costs. Raymond saved nearly half a million dollars on travel and marketing bill with Microsoft Live Meeting. Unified Communication uses a combination of instant messaging, voice over IP, video conferencing and Live Meeting. Another tool, Tele Presence, makes it almost look like face-to-face communication without any travel. But the initial costs are high.