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Microsoft is trying hard to become an open source friendly company, and it's made some strides since the days in which Steve Ballmer was calling Linux a cancer. But today, everyone pays lip service to open source. It's harder to walk the walk than to talk the talk, as we explored in our article on how to spot open-washing.

Microsoft has open-sourced various projects, is working with developers to run open source programming languages on its operating systems and recently hired a senior director of open source communities.

Rasmus Andersson, developer of sites such as Dropular and Spotnicc, has created a template for setting up an Amazon EC2 instance for running Node.js or other Web applications. You can use it save time setting up and deploying virtual servers while experimenting with new ideas.

The steps are outlined here and the template can be found Github here. It seems like a handy way to get up and running with Node.js.

Probase is a Microsoft Research project described as an "ongoing project that focuses on knowledge acquisition and knowledge serving." Its primary goal is to "enable machines to understand human behavior and human communication." It can be compared to Cyc, DBpedia or Freebase in that it is attempting to compile a massive collection of structured data that can be used to power artificial intelligence applications.

It's powered by a new graph database called Trinity, which is also a Microsoft Research project. Trinity was spotted today by MyNoSQL blogger Alex Popescu, and that led us to Probase. Neither project seems to be available to the public yet.

These and other projects shed some light on Microsoft's search and big data ambitions.

Look at the evolution of the enterprise and a pattern emerges. On-premise systems evolved to meet business demands. Today, there is the option to move services off the enterprise into the cloud.

This executive brief from IDC looks at how enterprises can turn their IT infrastructures into dynamic environments that can scale according to demand and better support business needs.

Look at the evolution of the enterprise and a pattern emerges. On-premise systems evolved to meet business demands. Today, there is the option to move services off the enterprise into the cloud.

This executive brief from IDC looks at how enterprises can turn its IT infrastructures into dynamic environments that can scale according to demand and better support business needs.

Today HP CEO Leo Apotheker announced HP's new strategy: cloud, connectivity and software. Mobility, consumerization of IT and big data will all play a role in this new strategy. In particular, HP's WebOS and Vertica acquisitions will drive it forward.

Here's a look at the specific plans Apotheker discussed.

Looking for an excuse to buy an iPad 2, which hit the streets today? The iPad continues to be used as a device for business as well as pleasure, and several enterprise apps were either released or updated since our last round-up. Take a look and see if any of them justify the expense of a new tablet.

Want a more global perspective of enterprise technology trends? Gartner's 2011 CIO Agenda survey included responses from 2,014 CIOs across 50 countries and 38 industries. In a recent announcement, Gartner detailed the responses of 36 top CIOs in India.

Cloud and mobile technologies beat more traditional concerns like enterprise resource planning and network communications.

Cloudnumbers.com, a cloud-based high-performance computing platform for complex computing, is now open for beta. Cloudnumbers.com will eventually support math and statistics environments like R and NumPy, specialized scientific software like AutoDock, and video rendering applications like Blender. For now it's specifically looking for users to test its R environment.

Today's cloud computing landscape is as complex as it is to decipher what the term actually means.

Last week, an animated Steve Mills made it clear in an interview with me that for him the cloud is nothing new. Mills leads the software group at IBM and spoke critically of the all-inclusive nature of what the cloud means. The cloud is more an evolution than an innovation. It's an extension of the computer as a metaphor for the transition from the mechanical age to the information age. The computer gives us a space and the cloud is an extension of that space.