On Friday we reported that Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft will partner a little more to integrate cloud computing with the needs of enterprise customers. Smaller enterprise customers are an untapped market for HP, which has announced major deals with large organizations. It's a migration strategy if you can manage to shift the responsibility for IT service outside your company -- and close a datacenter.

HP's CEO Mark Hurd noted that the $250 million the company will add to its expeditures with Microsoft is putting the profitable EDS unit of HP Services on the cloud mission.

This is aligning 11,000 HP Service professionals to this initiative. This is $250 million incremental dollars, alignment between engineering teams, services teams, go to market teams, all with the desire to make things simpler and easier for our customers, get the deeper levels of integration to optimize machine capability with software capability.

This sounded familiar to Brian Edminster of Applied Technologies, the HP 3000 consultancy and clearinghouse for open source solutions. At least HP is making a most retreat from its commodity rampage with such thinking, he says. It's almost as if the vendor is rediscovering its roots.

"I couldn't help but think back to the early days of proprietary computer system sales (i.e. HP 3000s)," Edminster says, "where there was 'alignment between research teams, engineering teams, service teams, and marketing teams' to make things 'simpler and easier for the customer,' providing systems with 'deep levels of integration' and software designed to 'optimize machine capacity.' "