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HP announced today that former SAP CEO Léo Apotheker will fill the role vacated by now ex-CEO Mark Hurd. The move has surprised many who expected the role to go to someone within HP. Apotheker's stint at SAP was somewhat less than stellar - he was CEO for only 7 months before being resigning when his contract wasn't renewed.

However, he had a 20 year career at SAP and had been the co-CEO for nearly two years before transitioning to CEO. CNET's Erica Ogg has the best take on the news I've seen: she suggests that Apotheker was hired for his established relationships with enterprise customers.

Somewhat overshadowed by today's news that Skype is partnering with Facebook comes a long expected announcement from the VOIP company: it is also partnering with telephony company Avaya to offer unified communication services. This follows Skype moving its business focused Skype Connect service out of beta. Of the "big three" unified communications companies (Avaya, Cisco and Microsoft), Avaya is the least well known, so this partnership may bring some cachet to the company's offerings.

Eric Schmidt took the stage today at TechCrunch Disrupt.

What he said seems striking, considering the pace of change we observe in our daily work. Schmidt said Moore's Law gave us a guide for the speed to expect on processing information. He said what we did not expect is the amount of information we would produce.

What's resulting in face of this big data are a number of alternatives to the Google way of search that we will learn a lot more about next week in Boston at Lucene Revolution, the first conference dedicated to open-source search.

At the BlackBerry Developers Conference today, RIM announced its first tablet, called the BlackBerry PlayBook, as well as new initiatives designed to make BlackBerry development easier and more profitable. As previously reported elsewhere, the tablet will run on QNX, a UNIX-like operating system RIM acquired earlier this year. Notably, RIM will support the "full web" - including Flash - on the tablet as well Adobe's AIR platform for cross-platform applications. Enterprises seeking to avoid the consumerization of IT and those interested in developing across platforms will both welcome these announcements.

Last week I revisited some concerns about cloud computing putting IT staff out of work. This week I want to look at the broader issue of technology displacing workers - and whether IT can do anything about it.

On his blog, Gartner VP and fellow Tom Austin asks where the new jobs are for those displaced by automation, where the improved work-life balance is for those that run the machines, and "How are all the IT and communications firms helping repair the social fabric that has been ripped to shreds during the last 30 to 40 years?"

A survey conducted by Securosis and financed by data security vendor Imperva of 1,100 security professionals yielded some interesting and conflicted results. The survey evaluated perceived effectiveness, not actual effectiveness, of several technologies (not specific products). The responses came from professionals across all major verticals and from organizations of varying sizes. Job titles included IT manager, IT security manager, IT security professional.

Platform development - it has to be one of the most discussed topics in the past few months and an exciting space to watch as the world of the open Web shifts to the emerging micro app universe.

Recently we have noticed that platforms with specific purposes are faring well as they provide ways for developers to connect the Web to the mobile universe in manners that are specific to a community.

For example, MindTouch is launching a service today that it calls a technical communications suite.

Android has seen astounding growth in both the consumer and enterprise markets, but the iPhone and BlackBerry have dominated enterprise-specific app development. That may be starting to change. Today Box.net released its cloud storage app for Android, and other enterprise-focused apps have been released recently as well. Given the enterprise interest in the iPad and the fact that several Android tablets are supposedly just around the corner, we could start seeing more enterprise Android development. Here are a few apps that are available now.

Do big enterprise vendors depends on market inefficiencies to give them an unfair advantage? That's what Bob Warfield is saying at Enterprise Irregulars. It's not a particularly shocking idea, or as potentially explosive as angel investors engaging in price fixing and collusion (allegedly). But it's worth considering, especially as SaaS and freemium pricing continue to proliferate in the enterprise.

Salesforce.com just released Chatter to the public in June, but the company is already announcing the release of Chatter 2. The new version, which should be generally available in October to both Salesforce.com and Chatter stand-alone subscribers, introduces new features the company says were commonly requested. Specifically, Chatter 2 gives users the ability to follow more types of "stuff." In addition to people, Chatter users will now be able to follow files, dashboard updates, reports and more.