Stories by: Eric Knorr

There's a special place reserved for the stalwart hardware that many of us have depended on day after day, year after year. Or at least, we believe there should be a special place.

At the Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, Microsoft made its biggest foray yet into cloud computing with pricing and partnership arrangements for Microsoft Online Services, a family that includes Online versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications, Office Live Meeting, and Dynamics CRM.

Project Big Green is IBM's sprawling initiative to increase the energy efficiency of IT. In May 2007, Big Blue announced that it would redirect no less than US$1 billion per year to Big Green, which applies both to solutions IBM offers to customers and to the company's own internal IT operations.

Microsoft has taken another baby step into on-demand services, with a bundle of small announcements that amount to a little rebranding here, and a couple of new services there. The new offerings are Office Live Workspace -- a free, personal, Web-based document storage and collaboration space hosted by Microsoft -- and a fresh edition of the company's Dynamics Live CRM product.

For years IBM has doggedly pursued the massive problem of pulling data strewn across the enterprise into an integrated, harmonious whole. At LinuxWorld on Monday, the company introduced IBM Information Server Blade, an appliance-like bundle intended to make the Herculean task of enterprise data integration faster and easier.

What a letdown. When word began circulating that Google and Sun Microsystems were poised to make a joint announcement, speculation abounded that Sun's StarOffice (or its lesser open source sibling, OpenOffice) had been somehow transformed into a Gmail-like suite that Google could deliver as a service. Microsoft, your Office fatware is history! The network computer lives!

CEO of US-based hosted integration provider, Grand Central Communications, Halsey Minor, has a powerful message for IT: "In four years ... basically the whole notion of enterprise application software is going to be dead." He believes application functionality will instead be available as hosted, pay-per-use services delivered by companies such as Salesforce.com.

There’s a Web services sea change in the air and it may rival the transformation ERP caused a decade ago.