In the modern business climate, consolidation of IT operations is a common pursuit towards enabling cost reduction and efficiency improvement, technology consolidation, service level management, and quality-driven best practices.

The following are common problems that lead to the need for consolidation projects:

Acquisitions have resulted in multiple data centers supported by a single, shrinking IT budget;
Servers have multiplied beyond the ability to effectively and economically manage them;
Applications have become more complex, often resulting in multiple layers of technology, each of which is managed by a separate functional group;
Organizational boundaries prevent smooth communication or cooperation, diminishing the quality of service to the end user;
IT spending is spread across dozens of budgets, which are difficult to administer and rationalize.