Stories by: Eric Knorr

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.

The cost and complexity of CRM has long stymied IT. But John Roberts, Clint Oram, and Jacob Taylor believed there was a better way. So in the spring of 2004, all three quit CRM software vendor E.piphany and -- after just three months of coding -- launched the Sugar open source project.

Like the mainframe, ERP (enterprise resource planning) software soldiers on, though companies complain bitterly about its inflexibility. Oracle just took a significant step toward softening that rigidity with its new Application Integration Architecture (AIA), announced by Oracle president Chuck Phillips at the company's Collaborate '07 User Group Conference.

Two metrics determine how much money Web sites make from advertising: page views and unique visitors. The number and character of "uniques" -- that is, how many separate and distinct individuals visit a Web site and how much they are likely to spend on products being advertised -- determines the cost of ads on a Web site. It's the page view, however, that governs how much money Web sites take in for ads sold at a given rate.

Tough business conditions often give rise to ingenious solutions. That was the case at Merrill Lynch several years ago when the economic boom went bust: An urgent desire to reduce IT overhead spurred a Web services initiative that has saved the company an estimated US$44 million in three years.

Hummer Winblad Venture Partners was established in 1989 as the first venture capital fund to invest exclusively in software companies. These days, 12 of the 30 companies in Hummer Winblad's portfolio are SAAS ventures. We spoke with Ann Winblad, co-founding partner, to better understand the extraordinary momentum of SAAS and her company's relationship with IBM.

Applications are evolving into a Web ecosystem. Will enterprises one day get their key apps through the Web?

In a now legendary 1995 memo, bill Gates raised the alarm that Microsoft was woefully unprepared for what he termed the "Internet Tidal Wave." Fast forward 10 years to last October, and Gates blasts out another high-priority e-mail, this time warning of a coming "services wave" of applications available instantly over the Internet. "The next sea change is upon us," he writes