That is the right way but they need both determination and luck. And most important, what they seem to have, the top management support.
I have done that in about same size company and I thought of a couple of things which were not mentioned in article, probably they do those but anyway. First, get a capacity planning person involved from beginning, this gets very important once the new systems get running and more so later on. Security of course. And "five staff members responsible for managing and automating the provisioning of new servers" - I would have a group which is responsible of not just the hw but really everything, see the capacity planning and security. Otherwise there will be many inside fights over the priorities and that can slow down or even destroy the whole good idea. I have seen that happening!
Anyway, it is good to see that more and more the companies (and government, see VA stories even if they goofed a little) start understanding that you can distribute the IT but not the control and responsibility, too many chefs or what they say..
An afterthought, he is right that today it takes forever to get hardware, etc. What has changed? There was a time when we got two huge airplanes full of systems on Friday evening and everything was running on Monday morning 8am, country wide banking systems, a building worth of equipment! Is it a planning problem, I don't know?