Mallesons is the latest of Australia’s top tier law firms to announce a redundancy programme, seeking headcount reduction of around 100 people as a result of the economic slowdown - but a switch to virtualisation and deep vendor discounts have spared the IT group from having to make cuts.

“Our budget has not suffered but we have retargeted it at areas with a better payback,” said Neiditsch. ”We have been running a very aggressive virtualisation campaign on the server side, and we are now 84% virtualised. Once you get to very high levels (of virtualisation) then you get significant operating cost and environmental benefits.”

He said that running costs (including the initial hardware and software investments) had more than halved over the last five years and the firm had also reduced its carbon footprint as a result of IT initiatives.

Neiditsch added that Mallesons planned to complete the virtualisation of more than 90% of its servers in the next ten months with only about 8% of servers (mostly running legacy applications) left standalone. Neiditsch believes that the firm will reach the virtualisation limit on the server side within the next 18 months, adding that “from there it is a natural progression for cloud computing.”

While Neiditsch does not believe cloud computing is sufficiently robust or mature enough for firms such as Mallesons to rely upon today, he believes that may change three to four years out.

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