But ask him what virtualization has helped him deliver to Credit Suisse, and you’ll get a dramatic answer: tremendous results. He’s not just talking about savings reaped from data center consolidation—which was what the first wave of virtualization projects was all about. Sanzone and other leading CIOs are taking virtualization to the next level. They’re using it to become the fast, flexible business partners that CEOs have always wanted.

One example: Virtualization has radically changed the way Sanzone’s IT group delivers computing power to the company’s application-hungry line of business units.

The old process of allocating a server box for a business unit—including purchasing, provisioning and configuring the hardware—took weeks or months. Now, Sanzone says, with his growing number of virtualized servers, “it can be done in one day.

“And we want to move to be even quicker.”

This, he notes, is the kind of benefit his business partners understand loud and clear. “They can see the impact of this type of technology and what it can mean to the business,” he says. Such as? “Such as a quicker time to market for the products that they need, competitive advantage and driving revenue growth.”

Virtualization, he continues, “is a beautiful combination: It’s cheaper and offers a lot more capability.”

Sprung out from server farm savings and spreading to Credit Suisse’s four core business units, virtualization has become a central piece of the $67 billion financial services company’s future.

Stephen Elliot, a research manager in the enterprise systems group of IDC (a sister company to CIO’s publisher), says this piece of technology can be vital for CIOs who are struggling with the business side’s expectations (one recent Forrester survey found that just 28 percent of CEOs think their CIOs are proactive business leaders). “Virtualization is an opportunity to strike more of a partnership with the business because you can drive out a more agile infrastructure and meet those [business] requirements faster,” Elliot says.

CIOs and analysts agree that IT departments need to move beyond simple “data center consolidation” thinking. Virtualization can enable dramatically faster provisioning of equipment and computing resources, better chargeback systems and stronger disaster recovery capabilities. It all adds up to a more flexible infrastructure that’s less a problem and more a solution.