Many applicants, of course, don't make it to finals of the Honors Program contest, but their stories are an indication of the direction of enterprise IT operations.

For example, Indiana University in Bloomington created what it calls an " " to support teaching and research." Part of the effort involves using virtualization technology to consolidate as many as 400 physical servers to 30 systems. Some 800 virtual machines are now supported on four socket, quad chip servers, said Robert Lowden, director of enterprise infrastructure, who estimated that the project's cost savings for the university are now approaching $1 million.

And the Brooklyn Health Information Exchange in New York is working with a number of hospitals, nursing homes and other health care providers to create a method sharing information. Health care providers now keep patient information mostly on internal systems -- and sometimes not even in an electronic format, said Irene Koch, the exchange's executive director. By enabling the sharing of information to follow patients, "we are going to improve the care by reducing errors, reducing duplication and creating efficiencies."

The Morgan Stanley Leadership Award for Global Commerce went to two NetApp Inc. executives, Chairman and CEO Daniel Warmenhoven and Tom Mendoza, the company's vice chairman. The pair are credited with overseeing a company that has grown from 45 employees in 1994 to about 8,000 today.