How do you get from here to there when you're doing a data center consolidation on this kind of scale, in this kind of environment? Hackenson and her consolidation project leader, Cliff Tozier, VP of global infrastructure, spoke to CIO.com Technology Editor Laurianne McLaughlin about the project and shared seven lessons that she and her team have learned so far:

1. Consolidating applications is harder than closing server rooms. Hackenson and her team are still in the process of consolidating the company's approximately 1,300 applications; she'd like to trim the portfolio to 500 to 600 applications. "The applications are almost more of a challenge than the data center," she says. Explaining to the business the logic of closing small server rooms isn't tough, but the business-side users feel application changes more closely, she says.

How is Alcatel-Lucent's application strategy changing? "Instead of having many applications to support, we want to get to a centralized environment," Hackenson says. "That's a strategy change." Previously, Alcatel let IT groups and employees in the various regions select their own applications, so the application set in Asia didn't necessarily match the one in Europe. She notes, "This creates a little more pressure on the network folks," who now have to ensure that response times for applications in HR and finance, for example, are similar around the world, despite the varying distances from the new main data center in France.

2. Virtualization has become key to IT flexibility. What role is virtualization playing in Alcatel-Lucent's new data centers? "We can dynamically increase [capacity] in hours or days, whereas in the past, it would have been weeks or months," Hackenson says. "When applications people need hardware, we can turn on services on demand," she says, noting that developers now get quicker access to computing power for projects such as portals. "Our strategy is to push virtualization as wide and deep as we can."

"Virtualization is absolutely critical," Hackenson says. "We no longer can afford for every application to have its own environment. With that situation, we were 10, 20, 30 percent utilized," she says, with the new goal being 60 to 70 percent utilized on servers. What's been tough about the virtualization effort? "You have to get over the emotion of developers wanting to control the server that their application lives on," Hackenson says.

3. Frameworks such as ITIL help ensure consistency across data centers. How did the way Hackenson and her team manage IT change as a result of the consolidation project? "We had decided to move to a centralized model for the whole IT organization," Hackenson says. For the global team that Cliff [Tozier] manages, there's a consistent set of processes and tools. This gives his team the ability to manage data centers remotely, which is what we're doing in France. We don't have to have large numbers of people physically in the data centers anymore."