InfoWorld’s Paul Krill recently reported that Richard Marcello, President of technology, consulting, and integration solutions at Unisys, said something that could be regarded as a bit of a PR blunder at the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo.

“We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India to serve a 1,200-person engineering organization.”

Well, great for those two guys in India, and I’m sure it’ll go a long way towards helping the Indian economy recover from its recent invasion of Dahler Mendi Clones… FROM SPACE! Still, I’m sure everyone who works in IT in the U.S. felt a chill go up their spine when reading that quote.

Now, part of the reason that Unisys was able to cut those jobs was because they set up a “private cloud” in the company, which allows them to do server provisioning in five minutes, compared to 10 days of manual provisioning. These provisioned servers could then be managed remotely.

This is true enough, as far as things go, but oftentimes it seems that companies view IT as nothing more than a capital expenditure which should be cut as much as possible. IT is not just a capital expense – it is, and always has been, the “force multiplier” of the business. IT doesn’t just cost money, it enables your company to grow with new challenges. Smart IT is about developing or delivering applications – and if you have a surplus of IT, consider using that surplus power to either improve performance for existing applications, or work on developing the applications to simplify workload.

The real power in cloud computing and virtualization is not just that it saves hardware costs, but that it frees up your engineers from doing things like maintenance and administration when they could be engineering – solving problems and improving solutions. In other words – IT doesn’t generate revenue directly, but they make the revenue generating parts of the business generate more revenue. If you don’t see value in that, you’re doing something wrong.