On the one hand IT people are being driven to focus on the basics given the state of the economy but at the same time we want to celebrate the companies that leveraged IT to change the very nature of their industries.

Back to Basics Movement Takes Hold in IT
As the Federal Reserve Bank continues to signal that times are tough, IT organizations appear to be focusing in the fundamentals. One of the best ways to rein in IT costs, however, is to invest more in automated systems management tools but you have to spend more upfront to save more on the back end. Unfortunately, others argue that what isn't obviously broke should just be left alone. Meanwhile, all this activity is once again raising questions about the role of the CIO in the overall organization.

The 25 Most Disruptive Companies
It not what IT can do but rather what you do with IT that matters. The editors of Baseline identify the companies that have had the most disruptive impact in their industries by leveraging technology. For further elaboration, check out this video.

Oracle Enterprise Application Sales Stall
After making numerous acquisitions of application vendors, Oracle is reporting that customers are being more cautious about new software licenses. This may account for why Oracle is now investing in bolstering its Web application development capabilities. But things may be just as difficult over at SAP, which finds itself the target of a lawsuit by a very unhappy customer. In the meantime, SAP has anointed a successor to its current CEO that may ultimately be tasked with transforming the company at a much faster rate as enterprise computing continues to evolve. But to be fair, Oracle has its share of customer miscues so it's pretty hard to tell when the vendor and when the customer is at fault.

IBM Gets Blindsided by Federal Complaint
Big Blue apparently was caught unaware by the fact that the folks at the Environmental Protection Agency were upset with them after they protested the award of a contact to a rival systems integrator. Now IBM has to contend with the fact that they are now frozen out of all Federal contracts until this issue gets resolved.

IBM to Finally Consolidate iSeries into the pSeries Servers
After years of insisting that these product lines were fundamentally different, IBM has acknowledged that a family of systems that use the same basic processor design are in fact pretty much the same server family. Elsewhere, IBM uncharacteristically partnered with Sun on storage. Sun then turned around and expanded it suit against IBM storage partner NetApp over patents. For its part, Netapp partnered with Citrix as part of a virtualization pact that could make all the existing systems a whole lot less relevant.

The Top 15 Influencers Driving Open Source Computing
Although any number of people can take issue with this list, it does show how diverse the open source community has become even if most people don't know that most of the code is being driven by professional developers working at large companies.

Calls for National CTO Emerge Once Again
Barack Obama says the U.S. needs a CTO that could make sense of what many say is a discombobulated national technology strategy. Of course, the most interesting political news of the week might be a new Web application that purports to let people see the correlations between political contributions and how lawmakers vote. Of course, the problem with lawmakers is that they are usually three steps behind the curve, which means they need public tutorials to figure out what an avatar is before they vote to regulate virtual worlds.

Ten Foolish Things that Vendors Do
In honor of April Fool's Day we thought we show you the most common way vendors make fools of themselves. We also thought you might get a kick out the best technology hoaxes of all time. And if that's not enough, here's what Google served up to celebrate the day.